Enterprise Architecture for Banking Platform on Azure Cloud

Enterprise Architecture for Banking Platform on Azure Cloud

1. Business Overview

A modern digital banking platform providing services such as core banking, payments, loan management, customer onboarding, fraud detection, and wealth management through a secure and scalable microservices architecture.

2. Risk Categories and Mitigation Plan

Category	Risk	Mitigation Strategy
Business	Rapidly changing regulatory or customer demands	Agile governance, roadmap iteration, and regulatory liaisons
Operational	Transaction failure or SLA breaches	Resilient architecture, active-active deployment, proactive monitoring
Environmental	Azure region outages or natural disasters	Multi-AZ and multi-region deployments, Azure Traffic Manager
Technology	Service dependency failures, integration mismatches	API contracts, Istio for service mesh, circuit breakers, retries
Security	Unauthorized access, fraud	Azure AD, SSO, NSG, firewall, mTLS with Istio, WAF, data encryption
Compliance	Non-compliance with RBI or GDPR	Automated compliance checks, audits, data masking, logging
People	Knowledge silos, attrition risks	Central documentation, cross-training, succession planning

3. Capabilities and Capability-Service Mapping

Capability	Service / Application
Customer Onboarding	KYC Service, Document Verification Service
Account Management	Account Service, Ledger Service
Loan Management	Loan Origination, Credit Scoring, Risk Service
Payments	Payment Gateway, UPI Service, Reconciliation Service
Fraud Detection	Fraud Analytics Service, Real-Time Alert Service
Wealth Management	Portfolio Service, Advisory Engine
Notifications	Email/SMS Notification Service
Reporting & Audit	Reporting Engine, Audit Log Service
User Access Management	Authentication, Authorization, Role Management

4. High-Level Technology Architecture

Microservices (Spring Boot)

• Stateless REST APIs, containerized with Docker

• Deployed in AKS clusters with Helm

• Communicate asynchronously via Kafka/Event Hub

Security & Networking

• Azure AD + SSO (OIDC/SAML)

• VPC with subnets for app, DB, Kafka, integration

• NSGs and Azure Firewall per subnet

• Istio for secure inter-service communication (mTLS, policies)

• API Management for rate limiting, OAuth2, external access control

• SSL configured at Azure Load Balancer, DNS via Azure DNS

Data Layer

• Azure SQL and Cosmos DB for structured/NoSQL data

• Azure Blob for document/file storage (e.g., KYC)

• Azure Event Hub + Kafka for event streaming

Infrastructure Components

• Azure Load Balancer (with DNS + SSL termination)

• Azure Traffic Manager (multi-region HA routing)

• Azure Container Registry (ACR) for image hosting

• Azure DevOps for CI/CD with gated approvals, testing, monitoring integration

• Azure Monitor, Application Insights for full observability

5. Component Integration & Connectivity

• Microservices use Istio service mesh (mTLS, traffic rules, retries, telemetry)

• Kafka used for async communication (audit events, transactions, fraud alerts)

• Azure API Management: exposed only whitelisted APIs externally, all secured

• DNS maps domains to Load Balancer endpoints with SSL offloading

• Azure DevOps pushes code to ACR → AKS via CI/CD pipeline

• Azure Monitor + App Insights integrated in each microservice

• Traffic Manager balances across multiple AKS clusters in different regions

6. DevOps & Observability

• Azure DevOps pipelines (CI/CD)

• Code quality gates, security scanning (SonarQube/WhiteSource)

• Docker containers stored in ACR

• Monitoring via Azure Monitor, App Insights, Log Analytics

• Alerting and dashboards for SLAs, availability, security events

7. Security Architecture

• Azure AD for authN/authZ

• SSO for customer portal and internal users

• API Gateway security with OAuth2 + JWT tokens

• SSL/TLS termination at Load Balancer

• Istio enforcing zero-trust (mTLS + access policies)

• Azure Key Vault for secrets management

• WAF on API Gateway and Load Balancer

• Data encryption at rest (TDE in SQL) and in transit (TLS)

8. Availability and Scalability

• Multi-AZ AKS clusters with HPA and Pod Disruption Budgets

• Traffic Manager supports regional failover/load distribution

• Kafka partitions auto-scaled based on volume

• Redis or Cosmos DB used with geo-replication for data redundancy

• Load balancing and caching via Azure Front Door or App Gateway if needed