Financial Services Industry Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework

Publication date: May 15, 2024 (Document revisions)

This document describes the Financial Services Industry Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The document describes general design principles, as well as specific best practices and guidance for the six pillars of the Well-Architected Framework.

Introduction

The financial services industry includes financial services firms, independent software vendors (ISVs), market utilities, and infrastructures that supply essential services to countries around the world. The industry consists of organizations that provide the main mechanisms for:

• Paying for goods and services

• Financial markets and asset trading

• Serving as intermediates between savers and borrowers (channeling savings into investment)

• Insuring against and dispersing risk

The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building systems on AWS. By using the Framework, you learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable systems in the cloud. The Framework provides a way for you to consistently measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. We believe that having well architected systems greatly increases your security, reliability, and the likelihood of business success.

In this lens, we focus the Well-Architected Framework on how to design, deploy, and architect financial services industry (FSI) workloads that promote the resiliency, security, cost savings, and operational performance in line with risk and control objectives that you define, including those that help you align with the regulatory and compliance requirements of supervisory authorities.

All customers should begin with the best practices and questions outlined in the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper. This document provides additional best practices that are focused on the technical architectures and workloads that are associated with financial services institutions.

The Financial Services Industry Lens identifies best practices for security, data privacy, and resiliency that are intended to address the requirements of financial institutions based on our experience working with financial institutions worldwide. It provides guidance on guardrails for technology teams to implement and confidently use AWS to build and deploy applications. This Lens describes the process of building transparency and auditability into your AWS environment. It also offers suggestions for controls to help you expedite adoption of new services into your environment while managing the cost of your IT services.

This document is intended for those in technology leadership roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), architectural leadership, developers, engineers, and operations team members, as well as individuals in the risk, compliance, and audit functions.