Fintech, payments, 340 employees

Migrating a regulated Irish fintech to AWS in eleven weeks

Lifted and shifted a regulated fintech's entire production estate from co-located infrastructure to AWS, with zero production downtime on the core payments processing service.

The client was running a payments-processing platform from a co-location facility and facing an end-of-contract deadline that made a migration necessary within a fixed window. The platform handled card transactions for several hundred thousand end users; the RTO for the core processing service was two hours.

Our assessment phase established that the monolith processing service was not cloud-ready in its current form — it carried hard-coded assumptions about network topology that would require refactoring before a cloud deployment could be production-safe. We scoped a four-week parallel engineering sprint to address the blocking issues before migration began.

The migration ran in four waves: non-critical services, stateless application tier, stateful services excluding payments, and finally the payments processing cluster itself. Each wave included a tested rollback plan with explicit decision criteria for aborting and returning to the co-location environment.

The production cut-over for the payments cluster ran on a Saturday morning with a five-hour maintenance window. Actual downtime was 47 minutes. A post-migration FinOps review identified £180,000 in annualised savings against the previous co-location bill.

Outcome

Successful migration within deadline; 47 minutes downtime on production cut-over; £180k annualised savings identified; client on ongoing managed cloud.