Eightcap’s cloud modernization enabled it to:
- Establish a secure, scalable, and innovative cloud foundation for long-term growth
- Achieve ISO 27001 certification in under 12 months
- Accelerate downtime recovery from 30-60 minutes to just 10
- Support expansion into new B2B markets through scalable infrastructure and faster deployment capabilities
- Increase platform uptime from 99.5% to 99.9%, improving reliability for clients across multiple regions
Eightcap is a global trading technology solutions provider and trusted contract for difference (CFD) broker, focused on building the infrastructure that powers modern markets. After scaling from 60 to almost 500 employees in just four years, the company began a strategic transformation, evolving from a traditional CFD broker into a technology-driven financial-services innovator.
To realise this next phase of growth, Eightcap and Thoughtworks partnered to reimagine the company’s cloud environment, creating a foundation capable of supporting continuous innovation, operational excellence and rapid scaling.
At the time, Eightcap’s AWS environment had become fragmented and difficult to manage, creating performance bottlenecks and manual workloads. A modernization roadmap was developed in partnership with Thoughtworks to deliver a secure, automated and compliant platform that accelerates innovation and unlocks new possibilities.
Challenge: How did Eightcap enable continuous innovation in a rapidly growing business?
With a strong reputation for innovation in a rapidly evolving market, Eightcap needed a cloud foundation that could help it develop new products, deliver best-in-class trading experiences and support its growing international footprint.
The transformation needed to:
Support the company’s rapid growth trajectory with seamless scalability, without requiring significant increases in infrastructure headcount
Enable ISO 27001 certification by embedding security and compliance by design
Be accompanied by new operating models and engineering practices that allowed teams to fully leverage the capabilities of a modern cloud infrastructure
Solution: Modernizing Eightcap’s cloud environment for agility and resilience
A secure, enterprise-grade AWS Landing Zone was developed in close collaboration between Eightcap and Thoughtworks.It was aligned with financial-services best practices to establish a strong, long-term foundation for growth and innovation.
The modernization journey followed a phased roadmap focused on delivering incremental value:
First, the teams built a secure financial-services landing zone and separated production and development environments, establishing a compliant foundation for ISO 27001 certification.
Next, Eightcap’s existing infrastructure was converted to Infrastructure as Code using Terraform. This enabled automation, scalability, and repeatability.
Then the company’s core trading platforms were modernized, introducing robust testing and development environments, modern engineering practices, and consistent CI/CD pipelines.
The modernization extended to Eightcap’s data services, building a secure, well-organized data architecture that empowered teams to operate as a data-driven business.
Finally, the automation of the MetaTrader platform increased system resilience, reducing recovery time following an outage from up to 60 minutes to just 10.
As a final step, the joint team explored how the new cloud environment could act as a springboard for innovation, enabling rapid experimentation and new product development while strengthening trust with B2B partners.
Now, Eightcap’s engineering teams are empowered with a modern, modular foundation for innovation. The design ensures new capabilities can be added efficiently, without the need to rebuild core infrastructure.
We’ve not only solved what we wanted to solve at the time of the project, but it’s also set us up to solve many other challenges that have come after, which has been really exciting. It’s put a really strong foundation in place for us to be able to leverage innovation and do new things, like execute on new products.
Results: What impact did cloud modernization have on Eightcap?
As soon as the phased process was complete, the results were clear. Eightcap achieved faster time-to-market, greater freedom to securely innovate and the ability to pursue opportunities that were previously out of reach.
Key outcomes from the cloud modernization project included:
A crucial step which wouldn’t have been possible with the company’s previous infrastructure.
For the MetaTrader platform from 30 to 60 minutes, down to just 10.
From 99.5% to 99.9%, supporting a smoother experience for clients and partners.
Eightcap was able to unlock several additional benefits, including:
- A shift away from manual “click ops” towards Infrastructure as Code, supporting rapid scaling without a proportional increase in team size.
Rapid account provisioning that cut the process from days to less than an hour.
Faster deployment cutting the time it took them to deploy a data app from days to just minutes.
Increased engineering performance and efficiency through consistent CI/CD pipelines, and proper development, staging, and production environments.
Reduced infrastructure-team workload by approximately 25% despite continued growth in transaction volumes and product complexity.
Accelerated new-product development cycles from several months to just weeks, allowing faster entry into new B2B and partner markets
Modernized data services by migrating data workloads to new, secure accounts and implementing DevOps principles — laying the groundwork for Eightcap to become a more data-driven company.
The modernization also enabled Eightcap to expand its market reach, supporting new B2B partnerships and the rollout of embedded trading solutions to global clients.
The partnership delivered not only the desired outcomes but also created a repeatable model for secure, scalable engineering across the organization.
“We were all very surprised by the speed at which Thoughtworks helped us achieve all of this,” said Simon Wilkinson, Eightcap CTO. “ISO 27001 certification would have taken us far longer to achieve without their help.”
With a new cloud foundation, Eightcap is now positioned to lead in trading-technology innovation. The company continues to push boundaries from data-driven insights to agentic AI, building on the strong foundation co-created with Thoughtworks.
Eightcap’s leading-edge agentic AI solution, built on AWS infrastructure, was announced alongside AWS at Black Hat USA in August, showcasing a capability that would not have been possible on its previous infrastructure. The solution was also featured at the AWS Financial Services Symposium in Sydney in September, highlighting Eightcap’s leadership in applying agentic AI within a secure and compliant trading environment.
Working with Thoughtworks gave us more than just infrastructure; it gave us a launchpad. The secure foundation we’ve built is now enabling our next phase of growth in agentic AI, where speed, trust and innovation all converge.
