Executive Summary

Bank of Palestine (BoP), one of the largest national banks in Palestine, is committed to advancing the country’s financial sector by integrating modern technologies into its operations. Serving over 850,000 customers through its extensive network of branches and ATMs, BoP continuously strives to modernize its services to enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. To support its ambitious goals, BoP has decided to migrate its new MicroStrategy analytics platform to AWS. Zero&One, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, will lead this transformation, implementing a highly secure, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud architecture. The project also introduces a centralized transit environment to streamline connectivity for future AWS workloads, ensuring a sustainable cloud-first strategy for BoP.

Customer Challenge

As the Bank of Palestine expands its services and embraces data-driven decision-making, its current infrastructure faces limitations in scalability, security, and performance. Hosting an advanced analytics tool like MicroStrategy requires a robust and flexible architecture to handle the computational demands of large-scale data processing while maintaining compliance with international security standards. Additionally, integrating on-premises systems with cloud resources in a seamless and secure manner has become a critical need, especially for managing sensitive banking data and analytics workloads.

Why Zero&One and AWS

Zero&One, with its deep expertise in AWS solutions and a proven track record of delivering complex cloud projects, is the ideal partner to support BoP’s cloud journey. The proposed solution will leverage AWS’s cutting-edge services to provide a secure, high-performing, and cost-effective environment for MicroStrategy. With features like Auto Scaling, multi-AZ deployments, and robust network firewalls, the AWS cloud ensures reliability, compliance, and operational resilience. Zero&One’s value-added services, including 24/7 managed support, cloud compliance, and ongoing performance optimization, will ensure a seamless transition and long-term success for BoP’s cloud initiatives.

The Solution

Zero&One proposes a comprehensive solution to deploy BoP’s MicroStrategy platform on AWS, integrating a robust and scalable architecture tailored to meet the bank’s operational and security needs. The solution begins with the creation of a dedicated AWS Transit Account to act as the central hub for all AWS workloads. This account will include a Transit Gateway, enabling secure site-to-site VPN connectivity between BoP’s on-premises data center and AWS. An AWS Network Firewall will be deployed within an inspection VPC to monitor and secure traffic between on-premises and cloud environments. For the production and UAT environments, a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) will be configured with public and private subnets distributed across multiple Availability Zones in the Frankfurt region. The architecture includes dedicated subnets for UAT and production workloads, ensuring clear isolation for testing and live operations. Compute resources for MicroStrategy will be provisioned using Amazon EC2 instances with Linux 2023 for production web and application servers. Each server will be backed by persistent Elastic File System (EFS) storage, providing high availability and scalability for data storage. The database layer will utilize Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL in a multi-AZ configuration, ensuring fault tolerance and high performance. The deployment will integrate Auto Scaling Groups for application servers, allowing resources to adjust dynamically based on workload demands. This self-healing architecture ensures continuous availability and optimal performance, even under heavy traffic or unexpected failures. To simplify maintenance and enhance security, AWS Systems Manager (Session Manager) will be used for remote instance access, eliminating the need for traditional bastion hosts.

Security is central to the solution, with AWS Network Firewall managing traffic inspection and AWS Config, GuardDuty, and CloudTrail providing continuous monitoring and threat detection. IAM policies and AWS Secrets Manager will ensure that credentials and access controls are securely managed, while compliance assessments for GDPR, ISO 27001, and CIS will validate adherence to industry standards. The architecture also incorporates cost optimization strategies. For instance, UAT instances will operate on a schedule to minimize runtime costs, and Savings Plans will be applied for predictable production workloads. Comprehensive billing reports and alerts will provide BoP with clear visibility into its cloud expenditure, helping the bank maintain financial control over its cloud operations.

Solution Architecture

Results and Benefits

The deployment of MicroStrategy on AWS will enable Bank of Palestine to unlock the full potential of its data analytics capabilities, driving faster and more informed decision-making. The new architecture offers enhanced scalability, ensuring that the platform can accommodate future growth in users and data volumes. Security and compliance measures are strengthened, safeguarding BoP’s sensitive data and meeting international banking standards. The automation of resource scaling and the integration of performance monitoring tools will optimize operational efficiency, reducing downtime and manual intervention. Cost optimization strategies, including scheduled resource usage and Savings Plans, will ensure long-term financial sustainability for the project.