Moving market infrastructure to the cloud, with the regulator in the room

The situation

A provider of clearing services wanted to leave its own data centres. The regulator was open to it, but expected resilience to improve, not just hold steady.

What we did

1. Agreed resilience targets with the regulator before choosing an architecture.
2. Designed a multi-region setup and tested failover under live-like load.
3. Gave the board independent assurance at each migration gate.

What changed

• 4 hours to 15 minutes recovery time for critical services
• Regulator sign-off at every migration gate
• Two data centres closed on schedule

The lesson

Agree what good looks like with the regulator before you choose the architecture, not after.