Seamless Cloud Migration for the CFPB with AWS

Client Overview

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a U.S. government agency responsible for regulating financial services and protecting consumers in the financial marketplace. Its mission depends on the secure handling of large volumes of sensitive financial data — consumer complaints, supervisory examinations, enforcement matters, and the supporting evidence that informs the agency’s regulatory decisions.

Challenge

CFPB’s core database infrastructure had been built and maintained over years on traditional self-managed deployments. Operating those systems carried a steady cost in administration, patching, backup management, and capacity planning, and the security posture required ongoing manual attention to keep pace with evolving compliance requirements.

The agency sought to modernize the infrastructure so that operational effort could be redirected toward mission work, while simultaneously raising the floor on security, scalability, and recoverability.

Solution

One Dynamic migrated the relevant database workloads to AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) — a managed database offering that absorbs much of the operational burden of running a production database environment. The migration was implemented with the following emphases:

• Managed operations. Patching, automated backups, point-in-time recovery, and high-availability configuration are handled by the managed service rather than by agency staff.
• Improved security baseline. Encryption at rest, encryption in transit, IAM-based access controls, and integration with AWS audit services were configured as part of the standard deployment, replacing controls that had previously been maintained out of band.
• Scalability without re-architecture. Compute and storage capacity scale through configuration changes rather than through procurement and physical provisioning, removing the long lead time that capacity planning had previously required.
• Customized AWS configuration for federal compliance. The deployment was tuned to satisfy the specific compliance requirements applicable to the agency’s data, including audit logging, retention, and access-review obligations.

Results

The migration produced concrete improvements across the dimensions that motivated the work:

• Successful migration with zero downtime. Cutover completed without an outage to dependent systems.
• Enhanced data security. Encryption, identity-based access, and managed audit logging now apply uniformly to the migrated workloads.
• Reduced operational cost. Day-to-day database administration effort was redirected from infrastructure maintenance to higher-value mission work.
• Improved scalability. Capacity changes now happen on the order of minutes rather than weeks, supporting future growth in data volume and query load.