Tencent Cloud Completes Airstar Bank's Full Migration to the Cloud to Create a More Agile Digital Bank

HONG KONG, April 25, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Migrating to the Cloud is quickly becoming an industry standard for the financial industry as it enables institutions to achieve greater performance, digital capabilities, operational efficiencies and cost management. Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, today announced it has helped Hong Kong'sAirstar Bank to successfully migrate its entire operations onto the Cloud, to facilitate more agility for their digital bank services and operations. Airstar Bank has been operating steadily on the cloud for over 100 days, witnessing significant improvements to the greater speed, stability and security that they are able to provide to their digital banking customers.

Airstar Bank is one of the first digital banks to be granted a banking license in Hong Kong and it continues to grow in market presence today. This has placed significant technological demands on Airstar Bank, as it needs to scale up quickly while balancing the high costs and resources that are required to support its growing operations.

In December 2023, Airstar Bank partnered with Tencent Cloud to initiate its cloud business migration plan, which will see all aspects of its business operations housed on the cloud. Tencent Cloud drew from its own extensive experience in cloud migration, formulating detailed technical plans and migration strategies to ensure a safe, smooth, and efficient transition to the cloud, while adhering to strict industry regulations and standards at all times.

Liming Hu, Vice President of Tencent Cloud, said: "Migrating to the cloud is the optimal solution for the digital transformation of the financial industry, and Airstar Bank's comprehensive cloud migration reflects its forward-looking approach to digitalization. Tencent Cloud is honored to assist Airstar Bank in smoothly and efficiently migrating to the cloud, helping to provide more diverse financial products and services to customers, improve customer satisfaction, and promote a virtuous cycle that enables rapid business development. In the future, Tencent Cloud will continue to focus on fintech and cloud services, offering leading digital banking solutions to financial institutions worldwide and supporting product and business innovation in the financial industry."

Felix Tao, Chief Technology Officer of Airstar Bank, said: "We are very pleased to partner with Tencent Cloud to successfully and smoothly complete the bank's cloud migration. We anticipate significant optimization in terms of resource costs and workload as well as the complexity of infrastructure operations and maintenance. As a 'user-oriented' digital bank, we remain committed to providing our customers with more diverse products and services. This development not only helps reduce costs and enhance efficiency, accelerating product iteration, but the flexibility and scalability of the new core system will also assist Airstar Bank in dynamically adjusting resources to meet future business expansion and peak customer flow demands. In view of all this, we strive to build a more agile digital bank supported by cloud technology." 

Airstar Bank adopted a layered architecture design to maintain the highest levels of security, utilizing partition isolation based on its unique business characteristics. Combined with Tencent Cloud's comprehensive security product capabilities, they built a security protection system at key nodes to safeguard bank data comprehensively. The bank's business data retrieval is also enhanced by integrating content acceleration and edge security through an edge security acceleration platform.

The financial industry, especially the banking sector, has very high requirements for the stability and security of IT systems. In terms of disaster recovery architecture, Tencent Cloud designed a multi-layer business disaster recovery architecture system for Airstar Bank, covering traffic access, business applications, and data storage. The overall system achieved a cross-AZ dual-active disaster recovery architecture, ensuring second-level rapid switching in the event of extreme failures. Relying on Tencent Cloud's observability platform, they monitored the operational status of all business nodes in real time.

During the cloud migration process, phased data migration proved to be critical. Each stage of the process needed to be completed quickly within a limited time window to ensure that various bank businesses were not affected. Tencent Cloud provided the tools and expert services to help Airstar Bank adapt and implement the migration effectively with limited disruptions. During the critical database migration phase, an assessment tool helps to first generate a report, which allows the bank to evaluate its business workload. After completing code refactoring, data synchronization is carried out using Tencent Cloud's DBbridge migration tool, ultimately switching business traffic to the cloud. The success rate of the overall cloud migration reached 100%, with no occurrence of business fallback or data rollback issues.

After completing the full cloud migration, Airstar Bank has seen significant improvements in high-performance data processing capabilities, along with a reduction in resource costs and the workload and complexity of infrastructure maintenance—estimated to lead to annual cost savings worth millions in the future. Additionally, the business systems can now fully leverage the diverse enterprise-grade commercial products available in the cloud to replace self-built open-source product components, significantly enhancing development efficiency and enabling agile application iterations and rapid responses to market changes.

About Tencent Cloud:

Tencent Cloud, one of the world's leading cloud companies, is committed to creating innovative solutions to resolve real-world issues and enabling digital transformation for smart industries. Through our extensive global infrastructure, Tencent Cloud provides businesses across the globe with stable and secure industry-leading cloud products and services, leveraging technological advancements such as cloud computing, Big Data analytics, AI, IoT, and network security. It is our constant mission to meet the needs of industries across the board, including the fields of gaming, media and entertainment, finance, healthcare, property, retail, travel, and transportation.

About Airstar Bank:

Airstar Bank is a digital bank in Hong Kong with Xiaomi Corporation and Futu Group as its key shareholders. The Bank upholds the virtue of financial inclusion by making cutting edge digital banking services accessible at our customers' fingertips. Airstar Bank has become a licensed bank under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority since May 9, 2019.

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SOURCE Tencent Cloud