From DORA-aligned multi-region architectures to APRA CPS 230 operational resilience, PCI DSS cardholder environments to ISO 27001 certification. We build for European banks, Australian super funds, payments processors, and trading platforms.
FCA / BaFin / DNB AwareDrawn from discovery calls with FinTech founders and CTOs over the last 18 months. If two or three of these sound familiar, we should talk.
The previous AWS partner positioned themselves as compliance-ready before DORA was actually drafted. Now articles 6, 8, 19, and 30 are operational and they don't have answers. Your audit cycle is approaching and the architecture doesn't map to the framework.
Early-stage growth velocity collided with growth-stage cost reality. RDS instances oversized "for safety," idle Reserved Instances from a planning round nobody documented, EKS nodes running at 15% utilization. The bill keeps growing and nobody on the team has time to dig in.
SOC 2, ISO 27001, sector-specific audits all demand audit evidence — log retention, encryption attestations, access reviews, change records. The infrastructure exists; the audit trail doesn't. Building it retroactively is painful and slow.
The early-stage hire who built the AWS infrastructure is now the only person who can operate it. They're on every incident, every deploy, every audit response. If they leave, you don't have a runway problem — you have an existential problem.
You hire pen-testers once a year. They produce a PDF. You file it. Continuous security monitoring and pipeline-integrated SAST/DAST/IaC scanning are in the roadmap, but never the next quarter. The risk profile doesn't match the regulatory posture you've claimed.
DORA's operational resilience requirements implicitly require multi-region capability for critical services. PSD2 strong customer authentication needs reliable failover. The team agrees it's important; nobody has time to actually design and test it.
FinTech compliance is a layered stack. Different regulators, different geographies, different effective dates. Below: the frameworks we work within most often, and the AWS architectural patterns each implies.
Digital Operational Resilience Act. Effective January 17, 2025. Articles 6, 8, 19, and 30 mandate ICT risk management, incident reporting within 24 hours, third-party risk register, and operational resilience testing.
DORA architecture deep-dive →EU Network and Information Systems Directive 2. Sectoral overlap with DORA, but distinct controls around essential service operators, supply chain security, and incident notification timelines.
NIS2 implementation →UK Financial Conduct Authority operational resilience rules (PS21/3). Set important business services, define impact tolerances, test scenarios. Mappable to DORA but with UK-specific definitions.
UK delivery context →Data residency requirements that affect AWS region choice. Frankfurt for Germany-resident data, Paris for France, Ireland for general EU. Cross-region considerations for backup, DR, and observability data.
GDPR architecture →Information security management. Baseline that most FinTech audit cycles assume. We hold ISO 27001:2022 ourselves — meaning we operate the standard, not just recommend it.
ISO 27001 implementation →If you handle card data directly. AWS shared responsibility model defines which controls inherit, which require implementation. Tokenization patterns, scoped network segments, automated scan integration.
Discuss your PCI scope →Sharia-compliant FinTech has architectural concerns that generic AWS partners overlook. We've worked through the patterns: no interest-bearing instruments, profit-sharing models, segregated funds, Sharia board audit trails. Specialism that matters in the GCC market.
Cost-plus financing and lease-to-own structures. Architecture decisions for asset tracking, profit calculation, and segregated transaction ledgers, audit-ready for Sharia review.
Islamic bonds backed by tangible assets. Real-time pricing, custody integration, secondary market matching. Scale-appropriate AWS architectures, not bank-grade overkill.
Mutual risk-sharing model. Participant fund segregation, Tabarru' contributions, surplus distribution. Architecture for the model differences vs conventional insurance.
Sharia Supervisory Board review of transactions and product structures. Audit-trail architecture supporting board reviews. Immutable logging via AWS QLDB or controlled S3 patterns.
Most FinTech engagements combine two or three of these. A typical growth-stage FinTech engagement: DORA architecture + cost optimization + DevSecOps pipeline. A typical early-stage company: cost optimization + ISO 27001 prep + DevOps capacity.
Map AWS workloads to DORA articles 6, 8, 19, and 30. Multi-region resilience patterns, incident reporting workflow, third-party register, operational resilience testing. Audit evidence baked in.
Deep-dive on DORA →AWS cost optimization framed for FinTech specifically. RDS right-sizing, Aurora vs. RDS analysis, Reserved Instance and Savings Plan strategy, EKS efficiency. Typical engagement: 18-30% cost reduction in Q1.
Cost optimization →SAST/DAST gates, IaC scanning, container security, SBOM generation, secrets management. Continuous instead of annual. AWS Security Specialty anchored. Audit evidence collected automatically.
DevSecOps service →Augment your one-engineer DevOps function. ECS, EKS, CodePipeline, Terraform. Monthly retainer or embedded engineer. Same engineers retained across months, not body-shop rotations.
DevOps service →24/7 managed operations with documented runbooks, incident response, audit evidence collection. Pro tier suits most FinTech scale-ups; Enterprise tier for revenue-critical workloads.
CloudOps service →Many FinTech scale-ups outgrow Heroku at early stage. Heroku to AWS migrations preserving Postgres, redesigning for ECS/EKS, with cost analysis showing payback. Typical migration pays back within 4-7 months.
Heroku to ECS →Different growth stages have different AWS architecture patterns. Honest advice: don't over-engineer for stages you haven't hit yet, and don't under-engineer for the stage you're already in.
One AWS region (typically eu-west-1 or eu-west-2). ECS Fargate or EC2-based deployment. Single-AZ RDS for cost. CodePipeline for CI/CD. Basic CloudWatch monitoring. ISO 27001 certification baseline started. AWS bill: typically $2.5-10k/month. Compliance posture: nascent but trackable.
Multi-AZ deployment for production. RDS Multi-AZ with read replicas. EKS adoption for stateful services. AWS WAF, GuardDuty, Security Hub. SOC 2 Type II in progress, DORA mapping started. Cost optimization typically lags by 1-2 quarters. AWS bill: typically $19-62k/month.
Active-active or active-passive multi-region. Aurora Global Database. Comprehensive observability via Datadog or AWS-native. DORA-compliant operational resilience tested quarterly. Mature FinOps with Reserved Instance and Savings Plan portfolio. AWS bill: typically $100-375k/month with active cost discipline.
Most AWS partners say "we work with FinTechs" because every consultancy does. The structural differences below are why FinTech buyers actually choose us.
HAZERCLOUD INFOTECH LLP holds ISO 27001:2022. We're not just helping you implement the standard — we live inside the audit cycle ourselves. The same procedures we recommend, we operate. That's structural credibility, not marketing claim.
Jobin holds AWS Security Specialty. The discovery call you have is with the AWS-certified specialist who leads the implementation team on your engagement. No bait-and-switch. No "our security team handles that." Founder accessible for compliance-critical decisions.
AWS Advanced Tier Partner designation means access to AWS funding programs (MAP for migrations, MDF for marketing co-investment, co-sell for enterprise opportunities). We can structure FinTech engagements to leverage AWS investment where applicable.
We don't run the body-shop economics. Our engagement model requires founder-attended weekly reviews, which structurally caps how many concurrent engagements we can run. The result: AWS-certified engineers actually doing the work, not just selling the discovery call.
Sharia-compliant FinTechs (Murabaha financing, Sukuk platforms, Takaful insurance) have specific architectural requirements alongside standard regulatory compliance. We have built and operated AWS infrastructure for Sharia-compliant workloads in the GCC market.
AWS architecture for cost-plus financing platforms. Asset purchase tracking, profit margin transparency, settlement workflows. Sharia board audit trails baked into the data layer.
Islamic bond platforms requiring asset-backed evidence trails, profit-sharing calculations, and cross-jurisdictional settlement. Multi-region AWS deployment for primary and secondary market activity.
Mutual insurance model requiring participant pool management, surplus distribution calculations, and Sharia-compliant investment of underlying funds. AWS data architecture for the Tabarru' fund accounting model.
Islamic FinTechs typically face Sharia compliance plus regulator compliance. Saudi (SAMA + Sharia board), UAE (CBUAE/DIFC + Sharia), Bahrain (CBB + Higher Sharia Authority), Kuwait (CBK CORF + Sharia board). Architecture respects both.
Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions standards as data model anchors. AWS data architecture and reporting designed against AAOIFI Financial Accounting Standards from the start.
Independent Sharia board oversight is structural for every Islamic FinTech. AWS observability and reporting designed to feed the Sharia board with the evidence they need, not just the engineering team.
Islamic FinTech is not a marketing label for HAZERCLOUD. It is a real category of GCC FinTech client where the architecture choices are different from conventional FinTech, and where most AWS partners do not have a coherent practice. We have one.
No sales pitch. We'll walk through your current AWS environment, identify the highest-leverage gaps for your funding stage and regulatory exposure, and tell you honestly whether we're a fit. If we're not, we'll suggest who is.
★ AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner · ISO 27001:2022 · ISO 9001:2015 · 5× AWS-Certified Founder
