Banking on speed and security

From wait times to workflows

Long before the shift to large-scale automation, Atruvia had established a strong security foundation with IBM Vault Enterprise. For years, Vault served as the central secrets manager for Atruvia’s on-premises applications, securing credentials, managing access keys, and providing a consistent way to enforce compliance across critical banking systems.

Building on that trusted security layer, Atruvia began exploring ways to bring the same level of consistency and control to infrastructure delivery. The answer came with IBM Terraform. What started as a small proof-of-concept for deploying cloud infrastructure quickly grew into a company-wide initiative to standardize provisioning, enable developer self-service, and embed compliance into every workflow.

“We wanted to have a single source of truth and a descriptive view of everything we run everywhere,” said Pelke. “And that’s what led us to Terraform.”

Terraform became the backbone of Atruvia’s new platformas-a-product model. By defining infrastructure as code (IaC), teams could finally replace manual requests with standardized, reusable modules and GitOps workflows. To secure provisioning in a regulated financial environment, Terraform was integrated with Vault and GitLab pipelines, allowing secrets to be injected directly into CI/CD workflows with full audit trails and policy enforcement.

“That’s where we can really shine,” said Pelke. “Standardized environments that make life easier for app teams, where everything is interconnected and deployed via self-service.” Cultural adoption was equally important. Atruvia didn’t mandate change, but it led by example. “We showed and didn’t tell,” said Essig. “We created a GitOps onboarding pattern, and more teams adopted it because it worked.”

To further support this shift, Atruvia trained consultants to guide development teams through the process, from repository setup to deploying infrastructure “the Atruvia way.” Together, Vault and Terraform became the foundation of a secure, compliant, and scalable provisioning pipeline built for modern banking.

Provisioning in minutes, not months

The shift to Terraform and Vault modernized Atruvia’s infrastructure and transformed how the organization delivers value. By automating provisioning, embedding compliance into pipelines, and enabling developer self-service, Atruvia turned IT from a bottleneck into a true business enabler. What once took months can now be done in minutes or hours, freeing teams to move faster, safer, and with greater confidence.

Pelke recalled a major turning point after adopting Terraform, when the network team was tasked with adapting a complex network configuration for a second cloud native segment in one of their data centers. The setup had evolved through years of experimentation, making it notoriously difficult and timeconsuming to reproduce.

“We built an entire cloud native network segment exactly configured like the first in 15 minutes, or an hour if we include troubleshooting. Without Terraform, that would’ve taken weeks.” Beyond time savings, Terraform and Vault have redefined how Atruvia’s teams work. System engineers who once relied on manual interventions now operate like software developers: writing code, versioning changes, and deploying through standardized pipelines.

“For our systems engineers, the workflow has changed drastically,” said Pelke. “Today, making a change means updating code, staging it, and deploying — not logging in on a Saturday night to fix things by hand. With Terraform, we’ve completely transformed how our system administrators work.”

Compliance, once a manual audit process, is now built into workflows, supported by automated scanning and centralized secret management. These changes also improved visibility and confidence across the organization. Security teams can now trace every infrastructure change, while developers enjoy faster feedback loops and fewer bottlenecks.