How financial institutions can approve AWS services for highly confidential data

As the financial services industry accelerates cloud adoption, it was refreshing to hear directly from David Solomon, Goldman Sachs CEO, on the keynote stage last year at AWS’s annual conference re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas.

Cloud services allow Goldman Sachs to simplify financial services technology in a safe, secure, and responsible manner. (For more on Solomon’s keynote, check out this interesting read: Goldman Sachs gives AWS the financial services nod of approval.)

As a Principal Solutions Architect within the Worldwide Financial Services industry group, one of the most frequently asked questions I receive is whether a particular AWS service is financial-services-ready. In a regulated industry like financial services, moving to the cloud isn’t a simple lift-and-shift exercise. Instead, financial institutions use a formal service-by-service assessment process, often called whitelisting, to demonstrate how cloud services can help address their regulatory obligations. When this process is not well defined, it can delay efforts to migrate data to the cloud.

In my latest blog post, I provide a framework consisting of five key considerations that financial institutions should focus on to help streamline the whitelisting of cloud services for their most confidential data. I also outline the key AWS capabilities that can help financial services organizations during this process.

Here are the five key considerations:

1. Achieving compliance
2. Data protection
3. Isolation of compute environments
4. Automating audits with APIs
5. Operational access and security

For many of the business and technology leaders that I work with, agility and the ability to innovate quickly are the top drivers for their cloud programs. Financial services institutions migrate to the cloud to help develop personalized digital experiences, break down data silos, develop new products, drive down margins for existing products, and proactively address global risk and compliance requirements. AWS customers who use a wide range of AWS services achieve greater agility as they move through the stages of cloud adoption. Using a wide range of services enables organizations to offload undifferentiated heavy lifting to AWS and focus on their core business and customers.

My goal is to guide financial services institutions as they move their company’s highly confidential data to the cloud – in both production environments and mission-critical workloads. The key considerations will help financial services organizations determine cloud service readiness and to achieve success in the cloud.

Read my full blog post on AWS Security Blog and share this tweet with your networks.

Learn more about how AWS enables digital transformation for financial services.