Creating a hybrid cloud environment using AWS Direct Connect with TBC Bank

TBC Bank has around 200 publicly available digital services that were originally published from on-premises infrastructure. These services all need to be highly available for the bank’s 1.3 million active monthly users.

As the bank grew and expanded its offerings, it became a bigger target. TBC Bank faced a flood of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, with sometimes over a billion requests hitting the network within minutes. Engineers spent more time defending service availability than building new features.

TBC Bank sought to create a protection layer before traffic reached its data centers. The bank chose to use AWS because it offered global, elastic services capable of handling modern threats. TBC Bank implemented AWS Shield, which protects networks and applications by analyzing network security configurations and providing managed DDoS protection, and AWS WAF to protect web applications from common exploits. “These services instantly changed the playing field,” says Alexander Kvaichadze, infrastructure services division lead at TBC Bank. “We can sleep better now that we don’t have to work 24/7 to defend against attacks.”

After implementing network security services on AWS, the bank moved on to tackle the next obstacle: lowering latency. TBC Bank adopted AWS Direct Connect to create a dedicated network connection to AWS. As a result, TBC Bank eliminated jitter and reduced latency for each API call by 20 ms. This reduction compounds within the bank’s hybrid infrastructure, where multiple API calls might happen in a single user action, saving hundreds of milliseconds total from the user’s perspective.

Using AWS Direct Connect also unlocked additional connectivity possibilities for TBC Bank’s infrastructure, such as securely connecting to third-party services within the bank’s AWS environment through AWS PrivateLink—establishing connectivity between virtual private clouds and AWS services without exposing data to the internet. “Using AWS Direct Connect didn’t just fix latency: It made hybrid cloud a reality,” says Zura Talikadze, infrastructure architect at TBC Bank. “We can now confidently build services that span both cloud and on premises, knowing the network will always deliver.”

The next acceleration in the bank’s cloud journey was to implement a content delivery network to reduce page load times and improve performance. For this, TBC Bank used Amazon CloudFront to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. Caching became an essential step so that not every request for frontend resources had to travel all the way to on-premises data centers in Georgia. TBC Bank migrated its entire single-page application to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. By hosting the application in Amazon S3 and delivering it through Amazon CloudFront, TBC Bank created a global distribution layer for its frontend, making load times consistently quick both inside and outside Georgia.

The bank then migrated static objects for all its applications to Amazon S3 and cached selected API responses. This lowered CPU and memory consumption, reduced traffic to its on-premises data centers, and sped up responses for users. “By using Amazon CloudFront, we fundamentally changed how we deliver banking services,” says Mate Gogiberidze, CloudOps team lead at TBC Bank. “This transformed TBC Bank from a regionally optimized digital bank into a globally performant service.”

After stabilizing security controls and accelerating performance, TBC Bank moved into modernization.

The bank designed and implemented a cloud-based preproduction environment on AWS, which can scale to simulate peaks in traffic and uses faster delivery pipelines. This has eliminated bottlenecks, reduced wait times, and facilitated parallel runtimes—all challenges that TBC Bank faced with its on-premises preproduction environment before the modernization. TBC Bank can also run stable integration testing in the environment using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, to spin up a clean, isolated test environment and shut it down afterward. These testing capabilities result in greater reliability and consistency for TBC Bank’s mobile and digital banking services. The AWS-based preproduction environment also provides TBC Bank with the capability for future cloud adoption, and the bank can use the preproduction environment as an additional disaster recovery solution.

Through this transformation journey, TBC Bank has achieved 99.92 percent availability across all services. The number of deployments increased from 4,662 in 2022 to 19,991 in 2025. Automated deployments increased from 47.9 percent of all deployments to 88.4 percent in that same period. Change lead times are only 2.28 days on average, and deployment frequency is 2.45 weeks.

“Our AWS journey changed far more than our infrastructure—it changed our mindset,” says Yuri Semenikhin, deputy chief information officer at TBC Bank. “We shifted from reactive to proactive, sped up deployment cycles, gained scalability, and developed a hybrid cloud mindset.”