AWS re:Invent 2022 wrap up: Capital One optimizes for productivity, efficiency, and security on AWS

The cloud presents massive opportunities to improve efficiency, reduce complexity, and accelerate innovation. For Capital One, however, digital transformation is a complex task due to the financial services industry’s strict security and compliance requirements. Financial institutions often seek effective strategies to adopt cloud technologies while remaining secure and compliant.

Capital One’s solution

In 2020, Capital One went all in on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and successfully retired its last data center. “We’re heavily invested in technology,” says George Mao, senior distinguished engineer at Capital One. “What this lets us do—being in the cloud—is to innovate faster and not have to worry about all of the, what AWS calls, undifferentiated heavy lifting, like managing servers.”

Capital One adopted a serverless-first approach for its cloud infrastructure. It has standardized components of AWS Lambda functions across its development, quality assurance, and production teams. Capital One also built One Pipeline, which checks that governance policies, risk controls, standards, and other components are aligned with Capital One’s stringent requirements.

Capital One also migrated different applications to purpose-fit databases, helping its backend databases manage data at a large scale and accelerate innovation. For example, its key-value databases rely on Amazon DynamoDB, which delivers low latency for real-time experiences. Its document databases use Amazon DocumentDB, which offers millisecond read and write latencies.

To support employees working in locations around the world, Capital One also migrated its virtual desktop infrastructure to Amazon WorkSpaces. Using this solution, the company provides a seamless self-service environment where remote workers can automatically provision infrastructure that is secure and compliant with financial services regulations. “Amazon WorkSpaces are in multiple regions, which makes failover possible,” says Steve David, senior manager with the enterprise monitoring and workflows team at Capital One. “For our end users, it’s been a positive response. They like the speed and the simplicity of the process. After the request is approved, the workspace build takes about 30 minutes.”

“Going to AWS managed services or serverless services massively reduces how much you have to do.” —Geetha Gopal, vice present of software engineering and head of cloud and productivity engineering, Capital One

Benefits of using AWS

By going all in on AWS, Capital One has accelerated innovation and agility while meeting its stringent security, governance, and compliance requirements. “Going to AWS managed services or serverless services massively reduces how much you have to do,” says Geetha Gopal, vice present of software engineering and head of cloud and productivity engineering at Capital One. The company can run, deploy, and test code quickly and implement automated services to reduce manual labor, helping teams focus on innovation.

The Amazon WorkSpaces project has vastly improved productivity and speed to market. The company saw a 30 percent increase in the use of virtual desktops among its users while enhancing the speed and simplicity of the provisioning process. “By automating Amazon WorkSpaces provisioning, what used to take us days now takes us less than an hour,” says Nasir Baig, operations manager at Capital One. On AWS, developers can get to work faster in secure environments while optimizing for speed, cost, and agility.

Company overview

Founded in 1994, Capital One is one of the top 10 banks in the United States, serving over one hundred million customers.

Check out “Practical experience with a serverless-first strategy at Capital One,” “Creating remote work environments that optimize security and productivity,” “How Capital One accelerates innovation with AWS databases,” and “Proactive governance and compliance for AWS workloads” for more information.

Capital One has successfully gone all in on AWS, adopting innovative cloud solutions that boost agility and productivity while meeting stringent security and compliance requirements.