A tier-one investment bank needed a production-grade cloud foundation that satisfied risk and regulator expectations while accelerating new product delivery. Their trading desks were eager to experiment, but every proof of concept hit the same wall: controls that broke under scrutiny and infrastructure teams drowning in manual work. cloudlogic.dev co-led the landing zone programme, shipping a governed Google Cloud Platform environment and the automation required to onboard the first trading workloads without disrupting the trading day.
The challenge
The bank’s prior move-to-cloud attempts delivered slide decks instead of production services. Fragmented on-premise controls slowed every experiment, and audit teams routinely rejected new environments. Executives wanted a landing zone that would earn buy-in from risk, prove a hard ROI, and let high-value trading workloads ship in the same quarter—not a year later.
What we did
- Architected a compliant landing zone: Designed organization hierarchy, identity patterns, networking (shared VPC, perimeter ingress/egress), encryption, and logging to align with internal policy and European regulators—captured in decision records every stakeholder could approve.
- Automated guardrails from day one: Delivered Terraform modules, policy-as-code, and CI/CD integration so platform, security, and application squads shared the same automation surface. Every control became reusable code instead of a spreadsheet checklist.
- Enabled hybrid connectivity and observability: Implemented dedicated interconnect, service perimeter controls, workload identity federation, and golden dashboards that gave runbooks, SLOs, and audit evidence to the teams operating trading workloads.
Impact
- First regulated workloads live in six months—three quarters faster than the bank’s previous cloud programme forecast.
- 52% reduction in infrastructure deployment cycle time via reusable automation, with platform engineers pushing more change through pipelines and less through change-control meetings.
- Passed audit review on first attempt with zero corrective actions, earning the programme a “low residual risk” rating and unlocking funding for the next wave of modernization.
- Platform team capacity freed by ~30% through policy-as-code and self-service patterns; engineers now spend time on reliability improvements and performance tuning instead of environment resets.
“The difference this time was tangible. Risk signed off, trading saw lower latency, and our engineering teams finally had tools they could extend. We stopped debating cloud strategy and started shipping.”
— Programme Director, Cloud Transformation
How the bank works today
Landing zone automation now underpins new product launches across trading, risk, and payments. The organisation uses the same guardrails to deploy to Google Cloud and hybrid environments, keeping compliance satisfied while teams experiment faster.