About the Client
The client is a dynamic fintech company dedicated to providing secure, smart payment processing solutions to businesses in various industries. Their products and services include fraud prevention, secure gateway integrations, and digital transaction management. With a high emphasis on customer trust and innovation, they enable companies to succeed in the digital financial environment.
Our client is innovative payment processing solutions provider had created a cloud payment gateway. With their user base expanding and the nature of digital threats changing, the company recognized the need to enhance their security stance, increase operational visibility, and maintain industry-standard compliance like PCI DSS.
Their objectives were well defined:
- Gain a secure and compliant AWS environment
- Implement end-to-end encryption and threat detection
- Centralize vulnerability management and security insights
- Integrate securely with both SaaS platforms and on-prem systems
- Embed security into the DevOps pipeline to proactively manage risk
In order to achieve these goals, the company opted to move their infrastructure to AWS with
the assistance of Ancrew.
Ancrew Solution
The Ancrew engineering team provided a customized, security-focused architecture on AWS, designed to scale with the client’s expanding business demands and changing threat environment. Significant implementations were:
- AWS Control Tower and Organizational Units (OUs): Built a scalable, multi-account AWS foundation that followed business units and compliance zones.
- Service Control Policies (SCPs) and Guardrails: Rolled out organization-level governance policies that enforce security best practices and against misconfigurations.
- Centralized Identity with AWS SSO: Provided secure, role-based access management across AWS accounts and minimized credential sprawl.
- Hybrid Connectivity with AWS Transit Gateway: Secured and simplified VPC-to-VPC and onpremises connectivity via a centralized network hub.
- PrivateLink and VPN Integration: Created secure communication channels between AWS services, third-party SaaS applications, and private data centers.
- Traffic Inspection and Threat Detection: Employed AWS Network Firewall and Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems to inspect traffic and block malicious activity.
- DDoS and Application Security: Deployed AWS Shield Advanced and AWS WAF to defend against mass-scale attacks and block malicious application traffic.
- End-to-End Encryption Strategy: Utilized AWS KMS and ACM to encrypt data in transit and at rest in all services.
- Proactive Threat Intelligence: Activated Amazon GuardDuty, Macie, and Inspector to detect anomalies, sensitive data exposure, and vulnerabilities.
- Unified Security Dashboard: Consolidated all findings through AWS Security Hub to have an integrated view of the security posture of the organization.
- Host-Level Monitoring: Integrated open-source Host Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) for extensive log analysis and behavior monitoring.
DevSecOps Security Integration:
- Integrated tools such as Trivy (container scanning), Falco (runtime anomaly detection), and Anchore (policy enforcement) into CI/CD pipelines.
- Implemented SAST, DAST, and SCA methodologies to secure code from development to deployment.
- Microservices Security with Istio: Istio-based secure service-to-service communication and traffic visibility in Kubernetes environments.
- Policy Compliance with OPA Gatekeeper: Applied compliance and operational policy enforcement at the Kubernetes level using Open Policy Agent.
- Secret Management: Applied HashiCorp Vault and OpenID Connect for securely managing secrets and service-level identity
Business Impact
The client-Ancrew partnership brought major business and technical benefits:
- Fortified Security Posture: Strengthened perimeter and internal defenses safeguarded sensitive payment information and user credentials against new threats.
- Accelerated Incident Response: Centralized monitoring and automated threat detection minimized response time and reduced downtime.
- Seamless Regulatory Alignment: Maintained and achieved PCI DSS compliance, bolstering trust with regulators and partners.
- Operational Efficiency: Automated governance, scalable infrastructure, and DevSecOps minimized manual overhead and enhanced deployment velocity.
- Customer Trust and Expansion: A provably secure platform strengthened brand reputation, customer loyalty, and new customer acquisition.
- Next-Generation Infrastructure: The modular, security-bydesign design enables innovation, high speed scaling, and changing compliance needs.