70%
Faster audit preparation with DR evidence ready for regulatory reviews
Investment Firm Strengthens DR Compliance with 60% Faster Testing on Azure
Assessed and restructured an inherited Azure environment to build a validated disaster recovery framework aligned with compliance needs.
60+
Azure resources audited, classified, and mapped as the baseline for DR planning
20%
Reduction in Azure spend after resource cleanup and Reserved Instances
Client Overview
Industry: Finance
Core business: Private investment group managing diversified portfolios across financial services, real estate, and philanthropy
Employees: 51–200
Geography: United States
Azure footprint: Critical financial workloads running on Microsoft Azure, including database, web, and remote desktop services managed across a multi-entity portfolio
Challenges
A US-based investment management firm runs critical financial workloads on Azure across a portfolio spanning financial services, real estate, and philanthropy. Operating under strict regulatory requirements, including FDIC and PCI DSS, the firm needed a validated disaster recovery strategy. But repeated attempts to establish one had failed, exposing deeper structural issues in the environment.
No validated recovery plan despite audit pressure
FDIC and PCI DSS requirements mandate documented, tested disaster recovery procedures. Without a validated plan in place, every audit cycle increased the firm's regulatory exposure and left recovery outcomes uncertain in the event of an actual disruption.
Inherited environment with no visibility into dependencies
The Azure estate had grown through successive third-party engagements, leaving internal teams without a clear view of resource configurations or service dependencies. Defining meaningful RTO and RPO targets was not feasible.
Infrastructure debt behind every failed DR attempt
Mismatched firewall versions, unsupported system configurations, and IP management complexity had built up across the environment over time. These were not background issues; they had directly caused previous DR implementation efforts to fail.
Solution
Simform partnered with the firm to assess its Azure environment, build a structured disaster recovery strategy, and validate it through controlled testing before anything touched production.
Environment assessment and resource cleanup
Conducted a full inventory of the Azure estate, classifying every active resource against current business use. Flagged unused services and orphaned components from prior engagements, creating a clean baseline for DR planning.
Workload tiering and recovery target alignment
Mapped service dependencies and tiered workloads by business criticality. Defined RTO and RPO targets with operations and compliance stakeholders, and produced a DR runbook aligned to FDIC and PCI DSS documentation requirements.
Failover simulation in an isolated test environment
Provisioned a dedicated Azure environment mirroring production across remote desktop, web, database, and network tiers. Ran end-to-end failover simulations, resolving firewall, IP, DNS, and VM configuration gaps before production.
Network hardening and cost optimization
Standardized firewall configurations and established a network security baseline. Applied Azure Reserved Instances and savings plans to cut costs, with a phased roadmap toward policy-driven access via Azure RBAC and NSGs.
Business Impact
The engagement moved the firm from unvalidated, fragmented DR procedures to a tested and repeatable disaster recovery framework aligned with regulatory expectations.
Audit-ready DR posture
The firm now maintains a documented, simulation-tested DR plan satisfying FDIC and PCI DSS requirements. Procedures that previously existed as untested assumptions are now validated and repeatable, reducing audit exposure.
Faster and repeatable failover testing
An isolated test environment that mirrors the production topology enables end-to-end DR simulations to run 60% faster, giving the team a reliable way to validate recovery readiness on an ongoing basis.
Lower Azure infrastructure costs
Decommissioning orphaned resources from prior vendor engagements, combined with Azure Reserved Instances and savings plans, reduced Azure spend by 20% without compromising recovery capacity.
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