Challenges

A leading financial service provider needed to migrate business-critical workloads from its on-premises infrastructure to AWS while maintaining strict compliance with financial and audit regulations. They required continuous configuration monitoring, automated governance, and centralized visibility across all AWS accounts.

Key challenges included:

• Maintaining regulatory compliance aligned with financial industry standards.
• Establishing centralized governance across multiple AWS accounts.
• Ensuring high availability and resilience for critical workloads.
• Providing real-time compliance visibility and audit readiness.

Searce Solution

Searce implemented AWS Config as the foundation for continuous compliance monitoring, integrated with AWS Control Tower and Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) to establish a governed multi-account AWS environment.

Key aspects of the solution included:

• Governance Setup: Deployed AWS Control Tower to manage multi-account structure and enforce governance guardrails.
• Configuration Management: Enabled AWS Config across all accounts and regions, with Config Aggregators consolidating compliance data in the central Audit account.
• Workload Migration: Migrated applications using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), ensuring high availability and security.
• Resilience and Recovery: Implemented Disaster Recovery using Elastic Disaster Recovery (EDRS) and Amazon RDS PITR for automated cross-region backups.
• Security Integration: Integrated third-party tools such as Palo Alto, ARCON, Cloudanix, and Site24x7 for enhanced visibility, access control, and operational monitoring.

Business Impact

• Compliance Automation: AWS Config conformance packs and guardrails continuously enforced configuration baselines, reducing the mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) critical misconfigurations from 24+ hours (via manual checks) to real-time (under 15 minutes).
• Centralized Governance: Unified monitoring through organization-wide Config Aggregators improved audit readiness and reporting accuracy. Provided 100% visibility into resource configurations and compliance state across all client's AWS accounts from a single, unified dashboard (the organization-wide Config Aggregator).
• Enhanced Security: Enforced critical data protection controls organization-wide, achieving 100% compliance on key policies like S3 public access blocks and encryption at rest for all new deployments.
• Operational Resilience: Automated migration, cross-region disaster recovery, and backup strategies reduced downtime and improved reliability. The Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) solution enabled non-disruptive DR testing, which reduced the time to validate the firm's recovery strategy from a 48+ hours weekend outage to under 2 hours with zero impact on production.
• Audit Simplification: Built-in Config reports provided the audit team with real-time evidence for compliance validation. Reduced the time for audit teams to gather compliance evidence from over 2 weeks to under 1 hour by leveraging the queryable, centralized data in the AWS Config Aggregator.

By leveraging AWS Config, Searce successfully enabled the client to achieve a secure, compliant, and fully governed AWS environment. Continuous compliance monitoring and automated rule enforcement strengthened the firm's risk posture. The solution provided real-time visibility across all AWS accounts, ensured audit readiness, and improved the overall governance framework for critical workloads.