Cloud Security Posture Management

Trillium Targets Secure, Compliant Cloud Infrastructure

With cloud computing rapidly phasing out legacy and on-premise applications and infrastructure, one of the leading payment services and mobile payment gateway providers in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region – we’ll call them Trillium – recognized the need for a secure, fully compliant hybrid cloud environment for their e-wallet application.

This application, that required lifting and shifting into the cloud, would serve all of Trillium’s e-wallet users in the Egypt area, with a full data migration that needed to be conducted within the short span of a year. Because Trillium had an existing relationship with Trianz, they turned to us to handle the e-wallet application’s platform migration, rearchitecting, and data governance.

Addressing Cloud Challenges

In June 2018, Trillium was looking to ensure that their cloud platform was up to standard, with a customized architecture to handle their approximately 300 vendor management systems (VMS) and appliances, as well as the more than 300,000 transactions made through the app in a day. This was especially important considering that these applications were financial inclusion products used by a large segment of Egypt’s population lacking access to full-scale banking services, as well as by small businesses.

In addition to this, Trillium needed to establish multiple front-end and back-end connectivity for the customers and for failover, while also having an environment that was compliant and secure according to PCI, SOC, and ISO 27001 regulatory standards, at all times.

Trillium required a thorough cloud security posture management (CSPM) process to help them detect misconfigurations, encryptions and inappropriate permissions, while also ascertaining regulatory policy compliance, monitoring suspicious activities, and enabling real-time protection for the cloud.

The Trianz Approach to CSPM

As an enterprise with considerable experience in the areas of cloud security and CSPM, Trianz partnered with Trillium to revamp their hybrid cloud environment. Our cloud experts sat down with the Trillium team to conduct a thorough cloud security posture audit.

This included discovering how and where their resources were being consumed, investigating the types of transactions that occurred on each resource, and identifying who accessed them.

A Secure Pathway To Data Access

Copyright © 2021 Trianz

When the teams were able to procure this information and identify Trillium’s cloud security needs, the Trianz consultants leveraged Azure Security Center, Key Store, and Defender – as well as other technologies like Sophos and Checkpoint – to monitor data access activities and configure alerts that would detect suspicious behavior.

With these alerts, Trillium’s hybrid cloud system would be able to automatically detect anomalies, firewall rules changes, and IP address ranges. Coupled with these upgrades, Trianz also worked with the client to perform a thorough assessment of their cloud platform misconfigurations.

Now armed with a deep understanding of the issues at play, the Trianz team was able to resolve Trillium’s key cloud platform misconfigurations in such a way that they achieved 100% in Azure’s Security Benchmark, as well as hitting their regulatory compliance targets.

The Technical Takeaways

Along with helping Trillium obtain their goal of being fully adherent to SOC, ISO 27001, PCI, and DSS data governance policies, Trianz was able to maintain their cloud environment misconfiguration-free, along with generating regulatory reports whenever requested.

Furthermore, our team was able to protect the cloud platform from data leakage by automatically blocking downloads to their infrastructure, as well as rejecting uploads of any malicious files. This was a clear step forward in terms of Trillium’s data security.

Impacts to the Business

Through our engagement with Trillium, we were also able to help them realize several impactful changes to their business. As a result of the increased security and higher data quality, the accuracy of insights improved, as did customer relations.

Higher regulatory compliance further strengthened the company’s reputation, while simultaneously lowering incident rates and consequently, the resources and hours wasted on resolutions as well. This would also guarantee smooth, uninterrupted service delivery to customers.

The hybrid cloud environment’s scalability meant that the e-wallet platform went gradually from being able to handle 300,000 transactions daily to 3 million, allowing them to onboard even more customers – whether private individuals or small businesses. All this, while remaining fully secure.

Furthermore, Trillium needed their data to be fully migrated and secured in the new cloud environment within the span of a year (i.e. by July 2019). By partnering with Trianz, they were able to achieve this goal and avoid the significant financial penalties that would come with a delay.

The Transformational Effects

By bringing their application platform and data from a legacy warehouse into a hybrid cloud environment that met their business needs and global regulatory compliance standards, Trianz was able to help Trillium become more a more cloud-native, customer-focused, and digitally empowered organization overall.