Announcing the AWS Well-Architected Financial Services Industry Lens

We are delighted to announce the release of a new version of the AWS Well-Architected Financial Services Industry Lens and whitepaper (FSI Lens). The Well-Architected guidance consists of a lens whitepaper and an AWS-created lens that’s available in the Lens Catalog of the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent approach for you to evaluate architectures and implement scalable designs. With the AWS Well-Architected Framework, cloud architects, system architects, engineers, and developers can build secure, high-performance, resilient, and cost-efficient infrastructure for applications and workloads.

Using the FSI Lens in the Lens Catalog, you can assess your Financial Services workload in the console, and produce a set of actionable results in a customized workload improvement plan.

The updated Financial Services Lens complements the best practices of the Well-Architected Framework with questions and recommended best practices specific to the financial services industry. The Lens is your guide to perform an AWS Well-Architected review to assess technical risks and implement upgrades to your FSI platforms and services.

Covering multiple use cases and scenarios across capital markets, insurance, payments, and banking, the refreshed lens offers implementation guidance to help you design and improve applications in this sector. It provides insights to deliver secure, high-performance, reliable, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in accordance with AWS best practices.

For more information on AWS Well-Architected Lenses, refer to AWS Well-Architected.

What’s new in the Financial Services Industry Lens?

The Financial Services Industry Lens is a collection of customer-proven design principles, best practices, and prescriptive guidance to help you adopt a cloud-centered approach to running financial workloads on AWS. These recommendations are based on insights that AWS has gathered from hundreds of customers, AWS partners, the field, and experience from our own technical specialist communities.

The new version adds and enhances the following topics:

• Expanded and updated Scenarios that influence the design and architecture of your financial services workloads on AWS. New Scenarios include:
  • Financial data mesh
  • Cyber-event recovery
  • Market data distribution
• Each scenario includes the common drivers for the design and a reference architecture.
• Improved best practices and implementation guidance that you can use to improve your financial workloads in areas that matter the most to your business.
• Updated features and services — AWS continues to evolve with new services, features, and emerging best practices. A listing of updated services has been incorporated into the Lens whitepaper to help you create more well-architected workloads.
• Updated architectures and links — Many new documents, blogs and links have been provided to reflect a host of new products, features, and current industry best practices to assist with your Financial Services Industry workloads.
• Included the Financial Services Industry Lens in the Lens Catalog of the Well-Architected Tool in the AWS Console.
• With a growing focus from our customers on environmental impacts, the Lens adds best practices to the Sustainability pillar. The updated guidance helps financial organizations build architectures that maximize efficiency, reduce waste and environmental impact.

Why use the Financial Services Industry Lens?

The Lens highlights many common areas for assessment and improvement of your workload. It’s designed to align with and provide insights across the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework:

• Operational excellence – Provides you with the ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into your operations, and continually improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.
• Security – Includes the ability to protect data, systems, and assets to take advantage of cloud technologies to improve your security.
• Reliability – Illustrates the ability of a system to automatically recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfiguration or transient network issues.
• Performance efficiency – Provides guidance on the efficient use of computing resources to meet your requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
• Cost optimization – Includes the continual process of system refinement and improvement over the entire lifecycle to optimize cost, from the initial design of your first proof of concept to the ongoing operation of production workload.
• Sustainability – Illuminates guidance on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. Topics including benchmarking, minimizing data redundancy without loss of reliability, encouraging a data minimization culture, right-sizing data processing and compute overhead, preventing unnecessary data movement, and efficiently managing your financial services infrastructure.

The new Financial Services Industry Lens provides guidance that can help you make appropriate design decisions in line with your business requirements. By applying the techniques detailed in this lens to your architecture, you can validate the resiliency, security and efficiency of your design. This lens also provides recommendations to address any gaps you may identify.

Who should use the Financial Services Industry Lens?

The Financial Services Industry Lens is intended for all AWS customers who provide financial services as part of their core business. These include companies providing banking services, trading and settlement, asset management, insurance, and payments processing as well as their partners, their vendors, and their customer.

The FSI Lens will be valuable regardless of your stage of cloud adoption: whether you’re launching your first financial workloads on AWS, migrating your existing services to the cloud, or are working to extend and improve existing AWS workloads.

The material is intended to support customers in roles such as architects, developers, and operations team members.

Conclusion

Applying the Financial Services Industry Lens to your existing architectures can validate the stability and efficiency of your design and provide recommendations to address identified gaps.

For more information about building your own Well-Architected systems using the Financial Services Industry Lens, see the Financial Services Industry Lens whitepaper on the AWS Well-Architected Website.

For information on how to use the new Lens to assess your workloads, please see the Well-Architected Tool and Lens Catalog briefs. If you require additional expert guidance, contact your AWS account team to engage a Specialist Solutions Architect.

To learn more about supported solutions, customer case studies, and additional resources, refer to the AWS for Industries: Financial Services blog.