Architectural Patterns for Immutable Financial Data Lakes on AWS S3 for Regulatory Compliance and Real-Time Analytics

Financial services business is becoming highly reliant on the safe and dependable storage of large quantities of structured and unstructured information. As the global regulatory demands become increasingly strict, including the SEC Rule 17a-4, Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), organizations now have to contend with the twin demands of maintaining compliance and ensuring immutability with the actions of being analytics agile in making decisions. In this paper, the design of an immutable financial data lake is explored based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) and a set of Amazon Web Services-native tools. In particular, it examines how using S3 versioning and object lock, and write-once-read-many (WORM) policies can be utilized together with AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift and Amazon Kinesis to create a secure, compliant and high-performing architecture. Through the implementation of architectural designs based on cloud-native principles, the study illustrates how financial institutions can be able to meet high auditability standards and at the same time, provide the benefit of real-time analytics to detect fraud and manage risk and conduct market research. In addition, it provides the governance, lineage and security structures that are required to maintain integrity and promote innovation. The results underscore the fact that data lakes of immutable data stored in clouds, properly designed, will level compliance assurances, as well as a stable base of a contemporary financial intelligence.