About Client:
The client is a global index and capital markets technology provider serving asset managers, ETF issuers, and financial institutions across the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, and the Middle East. Operating within the capital markets sector, the organization specializes in benchmark administration and the delivery of financial data and analytics solutions.
The Global Index Platform faced significant challenges in modernizing its capital markets technology platform to support a rapidly growing global client base and increasing volumes of financial data from vendors such as FactSet. The existing infrastructure lacked scalability and could not automatically handle peak workloads during critical index calculation and rebalancing cycles, creating risks of performance degradation and delayed service delivery. The platform also suffered from availability issues due to the absence of a multi-AZ architecture, introducing single points of failure across compute, database, and network layers. In addition, the environment lacked a structured governance and security framework, including enterprise-grade access management and consistent network controls, exposing the organization to operational and regulatory risks. Manual infrastructure management and limited monitoring capabilities further increased operational overhead, slowed incident response, and introduced human error into critical financial workflows. The Platform was also running a monolithic web application on a single standalone EC2 instance, creating major scalability, resiliency, and availability risks. Frequent P1 incidents impacting application availability and domain accessibility, along with increasing cloud costs from underutilized resources, further affected operational efficiency.
Additionally, the environment lacked centralized monitoring, observability, proactive alerting, and a structured governance and security framework, leading to operational, compliance, and audit-readiness challenges. Limited backup and disaster recovery capabilities increased operational risk, while the organization also required a scalable event-driven architecture, modern data streaming services, and secure automated integrations with external client platforms.
To address these challenges, a production-grade AWS infrastructure was designed and implemented to deliver a secure, scalable, and highly available financial services platform. The solution introduced automated scaling capabilities to efficiently process growing financial data volumes and support high-demand index calculation workloads, while a multi-AZ architecture eliminated single points of failure and improved service resilience. The Global Index Platform’s web application was modernized and migrated from a standalone EC2 instance to a containerized architecture using Amazon ECS on EC2, with Amazon ECR implemented for centralized container image management and deployment consistency. This enabled scalable, resilient, and standardized application deployments.
The platform was further strengthened with a structured multi-account governance model, secure networking, enterprise-grade IAM controls, infrastructure automation, centralized monitoring, and proactive incident management capabilities to improve operational efficiency, security, compliance readiness, and visibility across global financial operations.
Key Actions:
Designed a Highly Available Multi-AZ Architecture:
Implemented Elastic Scaling for Financial Workloads:
Strengthened Security and Governance Controls:
Observability, Monitoring & Production Stability:
Data Streaming, Automation & Event-Driven Integration:
Cost Optimization, Backup & Operational Resilience:
The solution is built on a secure, scalable, and highly available AWS architecture designed to support critical financial data processing and index management workloads. The environment is deployed within a dedicated Amazon VPC spanning three Availability Zones in the Mumbai Region (ap-south-1) to ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and operational resilience. User traffic is routed securely through Amazon Route 53 and AWS CloudFront, providing DNS management, optimized content delivery, and improved application accessibility. Requests are directed to Application Load Balancers (ALBs) deployed across public subnets, which distribute incoming traffic across containerized application workloads running on Amazon ECS on EC2 instances hosted within private subnets. The application layer is containerized using Amazon ECS with Amazon ECR serving as the centralized container image repository. ECS Auto Scaling ensures the platform can dynamically scale during peak financial data processing and index rebalancing cycles while maintaining consistent performance and availability. NAT Gateways enable secure outbound internet connectivity for workloads hosted in private subnets.
The platform incorporates enterprise-grade security and governance controls using AWS IAM, AWS KMS, AWS Secrets Manager, and Systems Manager Parameter Store for secure access management, encryption, and secrets handling. AWS GuardDuty, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon CloudWatch provide continuous threat detection, audit logging, centralized monitoring, and operational visibility across the environment. Amazon S3 is used for secure object storage and data management, with an S3 VPC Endpoint enabling private connectivity between workloads and S3 services without traversing the public internet. AWS Certificate Manager is used for SSL/TLS certificate management and secure communication.
The architecture integrates with MongoDB Atlas for application database services, enabling scalable and managed database operations. The overall solution delivers a resilient, secure, and modern cloud-native platform capable of supporting real-time financial data processing, application modernization, and future scalability requirements.
The following KPIs highlight the measurable improvements achieved through the implementation of a secure, highly available, and cloud-native AWS architecture.Â
KPI 1: Network Security Posture – Elimination of Public Exposure and Implementation of Segmented Architecture
KPI 2: Infrastructure Modernisation – Transition to Containerised, Auto-Scaling Architecture
The engagement provided valuable operational and architectural insights that have helped strengthened the delivery practices and established improved standards for future cloud transformation initiatives.
Challenge 1:Â Migration from Bare EC2 to Containerised Architecture with Shared Responsibility:
The Global Index Platform engagement involved a significant architectural shift from bare EC2 instances to a containerised ECS architecture. A key challenge was managing the division of responsibility during this migration. Comprinno designed and delivered the AWS infrastructure while Global Index Platform’s internal team handled application containerisation. Coordinating infrastructure readiness with application migration timelines required careful sequencing and close collaboration between both teams to ensure neither party was blocked during the transition.
Challenge 2:Â Establishing a Secure Multi-Account Governance Model from Scratch:
At the start of the engagement, Global Index Platform had no formal AWS account governance structure in place. Establishing a multi-account AWS Organisation with dedicated Production, Development, and Monitoring accounts, along with centralised IAM Identity Center, organisation-level CloudTrail, and scoped permission sets for each team. This required careful planning to avoid disrupting existing workloads while simultaneously implementing governance controls around them.
Challenge 3:Â Implementing Network Security for a Platform Previously Running in Public Subnets:
Prior to the engagement, all Global Index Platform production workloads were running in public subnets without structured network tier separation, meaning application servers and databases were directly reachable from the internet. Migrating existing workloads to a properly segmented public and private subnet architecture while maintaining platform continuity for a live production environment required careful execution to avoid service disruption during the transition.
The AWS-based transformation by Comprinno enabled the Global Index Platform to evolve from a manually managed and operationally constrained environment into a modern, secure, and highly scalable financial data platform. The new architecture significantly strengthens system resilience through multi-AZ high availability design, while automated scaling ensures consistent performance during peak index calculation and data ingestion workloads. In addition, the integration of enterprise-grade security controls and governance frameworks enhances compliance readiness and protects sensitive financial data across all layers of the platform. With infrastructure automation, centralized monitoring, and streamlined deployment processes, the solution also improves operational efficiency and reduces system downtime risks.
Overall, this modernization provides Global Index Platform with a future-ready AWS foundation that supports global expansion, accelerates innovation, and ensures reliable delivery of critical index data to institutional clients worldwide.
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