Financial Services Industry Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework

Publication date: June 2020 (Document Revisions)

Abstract

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 system provides the main mechanism for paying for goods, services, and financial assets; intermediates between savers and borrowers—channeling savings into investment; and insures against and disperses 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 on how to design, deploy, and architect financial services industry (FSI) workloads that promote the resiliency, security, and operational performance in line with risk and control objectives that you define, including those to meet the regulatory and compliance requirements of supervisory authorities.

All customers should start with the best practices and questions outlined in the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper. This document provides additional best practices for financial services institutions.

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

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

Custom lens availability

Custom lenses extend the best practice guidance provided by AWS Well-Architected Tool. AWS WA Tool allows you to create your own custom lenses, or to use lenses created by others that have been shared with you.

To determine if a custom lens is available for the lens described in this whitepaper, reach out to your Technical Account Manager (TAM), Solutions Architect (SA), or AWS Support.