Overview
Arinco helped TSB strengthen governance, operational visibility and efficiency across its Azure environment through a targeted platform governance uplift. As the bank’s cloud environment expanded, TSB sought to introduce clearer guardrails, streamline operational processes and improve consistency across subscriptions while maintaining strong security and compliance practices. Arinco implemented improved governance controls, identity and access workflows, monitoring capabilities and platform management processes across Azure. As a result, TSB now operates a more consistent and scalable cloud platform, enabling teams to deploy and manage workloads with greater confidence while maintaining strong governance oversight.
About TSB
TSB is a New Zealand financial institution providing retail and business banking services to customers nationwide. Founded in Taranaki in 1850, the bank operates across digital and physical channels, including 12 branches, delivering dependable and customer-centric financial services across New Zealand.
Business challenge
As TSB’s Azure environment continued to grow, the organisation identified an opportunity to further strengthen governance and operational consistency across its cloud platform. While the foundation was already well established, the bank wanted to introduce clearer guardrails and standardised processes to ensure new workloads could be onboarded consistently and managed effectively at scale.
TSB also aimed to streamline platform operations for engineering teams. Access management, governance reviews and day-to-day activities required greater standardisation to reduce manual effort while maintaining strong security and compliance oversight. Improving visibility across subscriptions and identifying opportunities to optimise platform costs were also key priorities.
The bank also needed to prepare its Azure environment for future growth, including upcoming network modernisation initiatives and continued cloud adoption. Strengthening governance patterns and operational practices would ensure the platform could scale reliably while enabling teams to deliver new services with confidence.
In addition, TSB sought external expertise to augment its internal cloud capability and bring greater structure to its platform evolution. There was a need to accelerate decision-making, prioritise improvements and define a clear roadmap for the next phase of the Azure environment, covering governance enhancements, operational efficiency and strategic direction to support ongoing cloud maturity.
Solution
Arinco delivered a targeted governance and platform operations uplift for TSB’s Azure environment, strengthening guardrails, improving operational workflows and increasing visibility across cloud subscriptions. Working closely with TSB’s cloud, security and identity teams, Arinco introduced consistent governance practices, streamlined access processes and improved monitoring capabilities to support the bank’s growing use of cloud services.
Strengthening governance and guardrails
Arinco established clearer governance guardrails across TSB’s Azure environment to improve consistency and reduce configuration drift as new workloads are introduced. Standardised templates, automated policy controls and structured deployment processes ensure platform changes follow defined governance standards, making it easier for teams to deploy resources safely and consistently.
Improving identity and access governance
Arinco strengthened identity and access governance by introducing clearer processes for how platform access is requested, approved and managed. Time-bound approvals and structured workflows reduced the need for long-standing privileged access while maintaining efficient access for engineering teams. This improved governance oversight while simplifying ongoing access reviews.
Enhancing monitoring and platform visibility
To improve operational insight, Arinco introduced consistent monitoring and diagnostics across TSB’s Azure environment, supported by centralised analytics and reporting. This provided teams with clearer visibility into platform health and performance, enabling them to identify issues earlier, prioritise remediation activities and manage the environment more effectively.
Preparing the platform for future growth
Arinco also helped TSB prepare for future platform changes, including upcoming network modernisation initiatives. This work included validating connectivity capacity and establishing a staged testing approach to reduce risk as changes are introduced. Alongside this, governance reviews identified opportunities to improve cost visibility and reduce unnecessary spend through improved resource management and clearer reporting for workload owners.
Outcomes
The engagement strengthened governance, improved operational efficiency and increased visibility across TSB’s Azure environment, establishing a more consistent and scalable cloud platform.
Key outcomes include:
- Improved platform consistency: Established enterprise governance guardrails via infrastructure-as-code across over 50 Azure subscriptions, with defined ownership and processes for managing policy exceptions, ensuring workloads are deployed and governed consistently as the environment grows.
- Stronger access governance: Streamlined access request and approval processes, reducing standing privileged access while maintaining efficient workflows for cloud and engineering teams.
- Greater operational efficiency: Reduced manual effort through standardised deployment processes and reusable templates that simplified platform operations and governance activities.
- Enhanced platform visibility: Improved monitoring and centralised analytics, enabling teams to better understand platform health and prioritise remediation activities.
- Improved cost visibility: Identified opportunities to reduce cloud spend through improved resource management and clearer cost reporting.
- Network change readiness: Validated connectivity capacity and introduced a staged testing approach to support upcoming network modernisation initiatives while minimising risk to existing workloads.
What's next?
With a more consistent and well-governed platform in place, TSB is now better positioned to leverage Azure as a foundation for improving customer experience, modernising workloads and increasing the overall resilience and performance of its digital services. This enables the bank to deliver new capabilities with greater speed and confidence while maintaining strong governance and security.
Arinco will continue supporting TSB through ongoing platform improvements, cost optimisation initiatives and roadmap activities designed to strengthen reliability, performance and cloud team productivity as the bank’s cloud environment continues to evolve.
