Well-Architected Framework: Financial services industry (FSI) perspective

Last reviewed 2025-07-28 UTC

This document in the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework describes principles and recommendations to help you to design, build, and manage financial services industry (FSI) applications in Google Cloud that meet your operational, security, reliability, cost, and performance goals.

The target audience for this document includes decision makers, architects, administrators, developers, and operators who design, build, deploy, and maintain FSI workloads in Google Cloud. Examples of FSI organizations that could benefit from this guidance include banks, payment infrastructure players, insurance providers, and capital market operators.

FSI organizations have specific considerations, particularly for architecture and resilience. These considerations are primarily driven by regulatory, risk, and performance requirements. This document provides high-level guidance that's based on design considerations that we've observed across a wide range of FSI customers globally. Whether your workloads are fully in the cloud or transitioning to hybrid or multi-cloud deployments, the guidance in this document helps you design workloads on Google Cloud to meet your regulatory requirements and diverse risk perspectives. The guidance might not address the unique challenges of every organization. It provides a foundation that addresses many of the primary regulatory requirements of FSI organizations.

A primary challenge in designing cloud workloads involves aligning cloud deployments with on-premises environments, especially when you aim for consistent approaches to security, reliability, and resilience. Cloud services create opportunities to fundamentally rethink your architecture in order to reduce management overhead, optimize cost, enhance security, and improve reliability and resilience.

The following pages describe principles and recommendations that are specific to FSI workloads for each pillar of the Well-Architected Framework:

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