Cloud-to-On-Premises Migration for a Financial Services Organisation in Liquidation

The Challenge

A financial services organisation entering a formal liquidation process faced a critical operational challenge: how to keep systems running for regulatory audit purposes while dramatically reducing the cost of an infrastructure that was no longer generating revenue.

The organisation had built its entire platform on Microsoft Azure - a sensible decision at launch, but one that carried significant monthly cost once the business stopped onboarding new customers. Systems still had to remain available for regulatory audit and compliance review, and the board had mandated an immediate reduction in operational expenditure.

The core tension was straightforward but technically demanding: the organisation could not simply switch things off. Regulatory obligations required full data integrity, audit trail access, and system availability throughout the wind-down process. At the same time, the cost of maintaining a full Azure environment for a dormant business was unsustainable.

The engagement required maintaining data integrity and audit trail access throughout migration, meeting compliance obligations without unnecessary spend, executing the migration without disrupting live audit processes already underway, and eliminating proprietary licensing costs where open-source alternatives existed.

The Approach

Pyneora designed and executed a full infrastructure transformation - migrating the organisation from an expensive cloud-hosted environment to a lean, secure, and fully compliant on-premises architecture. Every decision was driven by actual operational requirements, not assumptions.

Cloud-to-On-Premises Migration

Full migration from Azure to an on-premises Proxmox virtualisation environment, engineered for reliability and operational simplicity. Proxmox provided enterprise-grade virtualisation capability with zero licensing cost.

Open-Source Re-Platforming

The custom loan origination and servicing platform was re-platformed onto the open-source Mifos stack, eliminating proprietary licensing fees entirely. Mifos is purpose-built for financial services workloads and provided full feature parity for the organisation's remaining operational requirements.

Data and System Cleanup

Prior to migration, Pyneora conducted a full analysis of the production environment. The findings were significant: the vast majority of storage and compute being paid for each month was not serving any legitimate business function.

Metric	Finding
Total database size analysed	21 GB
Actual business-critical data	Less than 1%
Remainder comprised of	System logs, verbose audit trail entries, cached API response data, orphaned transaction records

This is not unusual. Most cloud environments are significantly over-provisioned relative to actual business data requirements. Organisations pay for infrastructure sized to their log volume - not their business volume. A disciplined data audit and architecture rationalisation can uncover savings that are otherwise invisible in standard cloud cost reviews.

Secure Network Architecture

A fully segmented VLAN network architecture was implemented to isolate workloads and enforce security boundaries at the infrastructure layer - the same design principles applied in enterprise environments, adapted to the scale of this engagement.

Resilient Backup Strategy

Offsite cloud backup integration was retained for data resilience and disaster recovery capability, without the cost of running full workloads in the cloud. Primary storage on-premises; backup offsite.

Architecture Overview

• Virtualised infrastructure - Proxmox-based virtualisation provides flexible workload management with enterprise-grade reliability and zero licensing cost.
• VLAN-segmented networking - logical network segmentation isolates workloads, limits blast radius, and enforces least-privilege access at the network layer.
• Internal DNS and certificate authority - internal DNS resolution and a private CA enable encrypted, authenticated internal communication without external dependencies.
• Hybrid backup architecture - on-premises primary storage paired with offsite cloud backup delivers resilience against hardware failure and site-level incidents.

The Broader Principle

Cloud is not always the end state. The right infrastructure is the one that fits your business - not the one that was the default choice five years ago.

Business conditions change. Regulatory environments shift, growth projections change, and cost mandates arrive without warning. When they do, your infrastructure strategy needs to be agile enough to adapt - not locked into an architecture designed for a business context that no longer exists.

If your monthly cloud bill has grown faster than your business, or your workloads are stable while costs are not, that is worth examining. Pyneora begins every infrastructure engagement with a rigorous cost and architecture review - so you have the evidence you need before committing to anything.