Saving banks from technical debt: How Atruvia built secure, self-service infrastructure

Source: HashiCorp Blog

Atruvia at a Glance

• Customers: 900+ financial institutions in Germany (e.g., Volksbank, Raiffeisenbank)
• Scale:
  • 91 million accounts
  • 9.3 billion annual transactions
  • 26 000 self‑service machines nationwide

Like many enterprises born in a pre‑digital era, Atruvia faced fragmented automation, sprawling hybrid environments, and rising compliance demands. To keep delivering trusted, always‑on banking services, Atruvia had to evolve from within.

With HashiCorp’s Support Atruvia Achieved

• Cluster provisioning: 3 months → 2 hours
• Network setup: weeks → minutes
• Standardized pipelines & configurations across hybrid environments
• Company‑wide IaC standard

Challenge: Manual Workflows & Process Debt

After years of struggling with a fragmented tech stack, Atruvia announced a new strategic direction: evolve from a traditional IT service provider into a digitalization partner for Germany’s cooperative banking sector.

Key Operational Challenges

• Manual provisioning & ticket‑based workflows
• Siloed automation tools
• Scattered documentation & siloed knowledge
• No unified APIs for core systems
• Compliance requirements adding friction to already slow delivery cycles

“We were operating with a weird stack of tooling that you fuse together, and it was still always process‑oriented rather than product‑oriented.”
— Martin Pelke, Product Owner for Infrastructure as Code, Atruvia

The legacy culture didn’t help:

“Whoever you would talk to, they would always say it’s automated,” Pelke added. “But when you ask a development team with infrastructure needs, they’d say, ‘I don’t know, it’s ticket ops.’”

With regulatory demands increasing, the cost of manual processes was measured in both developer time and growing security risks. Atruvia needed a modern foundation that enabled speed and scale without compromising compliance.

Solution: A Platform Mindset

From Manual to Product‑Based Workflow

Atruvia’s first priority was provisioning. After smaller HashiCorp pilots, the team expanded the partnership, starting with Terraform.

“We wanted a single source of truth and a descriptive view of everything we run everywhere. That’s what led us to Terraform.”
— Martin Pelke

This shift moved Atruvia from reactive support to proactive enablement via platform‑as‑a‑product thinking, powered by IaC templates and automation.

Implementation Highlights

“That’s where we can really shine: Standardized environments that make life easier for our app teams.”
— Martin Pelke

Integrating Security

Speed without security is meaningless. Atruvia introduced HashiCorp Vault to centralize secrets management.

Vault Benefits

• Centralized secrets store
• Secure injection into CI/CD pipelines
• Foundation for dynamic secrets & namespace provisioning

Although operated by a separate team, Vault integrated tightly with Terraform workflows, allowing rapid delivery without compromising compliance. By embedding Vault into CI/CD, Atruvia gained:

• Improved visibility
• Reusable, scalable security foundation
• Elimination of bespoke, insecure secret‑handling processes

Selling the Platform Internally

A great solution means nothing if teams won’t use it. Atruvia avoided top‑down mandates; instead, they showed, not told.

“We created a GitOps onboarding pattern, and more teams adopted it because it worked.”
— Lukas Essig, Platform Engineer, Atruvia

Enablement Tactics

• Trained two consultants to guide teams step‑by‑step
• Replaced long documents with live, interactive sessions
• Demonstrated real‑world success patterns

Teams learned to build and deploy infrastructure “the Atruvia way.”

ROI of Automation

Atruvia’s transformation streamlined operations and redefined how the organization builds, delivers, and secures infrastructure at scale.

“We rebuilt an entire cloud‑native network segment in an hour — including troubleshooting. Without Terraform, that would’ve taken weeks.”

The shift to IaC and standardized workflows not only delivered tangible time savings but also sparked a cultural shift toward product‑centric thinking and continuous compliance.

Roadmapping Resilience

(Section truncated in the source material – intended to outline future steps for sustaining resilience and scaling the platform.)

# Atruvia’s Scalable, Compliant Automation Foundation

With a scalable, compliant automation foundation in place, Atruvia is continuing to evolve its platform strategy.

## Looking Ahead

The team is focusing on:

- **Deeper GitLab and Vault integration** for just‑in‑time secrets injection  
- **Scaling policy as code** to enforce compliance across all platforms  
- **Standardizing internal APIs** for product‑like infrastructure delivery  

Terraform and Vault are now embedded in the company’s strategic roadmap, enabling speed, security, and innovation. For Atruvia, that means more than modernization—it means delivering the digital future of banking, one secure deployment at a time.

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