Modernizing FinTech Infrastructure with AWS ECS & PCI-DSS Compliance

Client Overview

Falcon is a leading provider of Credit Card Management Systems (CMS), serving the rapidly evolving financial technology sector. Their platform processes high-velocity financial transactions and handles sensitive cardholder data for a growing network of banking partners.

As Falcon expanded its footprint, its legacy infrastructure hosted on standalone EC2 instances struggled to keep pace with dynamic scaling demands. Furthermore, new partnerships with major banks introduced rigorous regulatory requirements, specifically PCI DSS compliance and Bank Information Security Group (ISG) audits, which their existing setup could not support. Falcon partnered with SquareOps Technologies to architect a secure, compliant, and scalable modernization strategy.

Challenges

The project required solving complex technical and regulatory hurdles inherent to the financial sector:

• Regulatory Compliance: The infrastructure lacked the strict controls required for PCI DSS certification and Bank ISG audits, creating a barrier to onboarding new banking clients.
• Multi-Tenant Isolation: As a multi-tenant CMS, the system required absolute segregation of tenant data and application logs to prevent data leakage, which was difficult to manage with the existing legacy setup.
• High Availability & Business Continuity: Falcon needed to guarantee 99.99% uptime within the primary region and establish a validated Disaster Recovery (DR) site in a separate seismic zone (AWS Hyderabad) to ensure business continuity.
• Operational Inefficiency: Manual server provisioning and deployment processes were error-prone and slowed down feature releases.

Solution Implemented

SquareOps, an AWS Advanced Tier Partner, engineered a "Modernization using ECS" strategy. We transitioned the monolithic application to a microservices-ready architecture using managed AWS services to reduce operational overhead while maximizing security.

1. Compute & Orchestration (Amazon ECS) We moved away from manual EC2 management by containerizing the CMS applications and deploying them on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS).

• Containerization: Refactored applications into Docker containers to ensure consistent environments from Development to Production.
• Automated CI/CD: Implemented a robust pipeline using Jenkins and AWS CodeDeploy. This automation eliminated manual errors and enabled "Blue/Green" deployments, ensuring zero-downtime updates during release cycles.

2. Banking-Grade Data Architecture To handle sensitive financial data with high throughput and reliability:

• Transactional Integrity: Migrated to Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL) for secure, ACID-compliant transaction recording.
• Flexible Storage: Deployed Amazon DocumentDB (MongoDB compatible) to handle unstructured data components efficiently.
• Event Streaming: Utilized Amazon MSK (Managed Kafka) to decouple services and process high-volume transaction logs asynchronously.

3. Security & Compliance (PCI DSS) Security was "shifted left" and integrated into the infrastructure code to satisfy ISG audits:

• Perimeter Defense: Deployed AWS WAF and IDS/IPS solutions to filter malicious traffic and prevent intrusion attempts.
• Threat Detection: Integrated a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solution for real-time monitoring of security logs and incident response.
• Network Isolation: Established a secure VPC architecture with strict subnet isolation, ensuring database and app layers were never directly exposed to the public internet.

4. Disaster Recovery (AWS Hyderabad Region) We established a passive DR site in the AWS Hyderabad region to ensure data residency and business continuity.

• Replication: Configured automated, cross-region replication for RDS and DocumentDB to meet strict Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).
• Redundancy: The primary region was architected for High Availability (HA) across multiple Availability Zones to meet the 99.99% uptime SLA.

Results & Business Impact

• Audit Readiness: The platform successfully met the criteria for PCI DSS compliance and Bank ISG audits, unlocking key partnership opportunities with major banks.
• 99.99% Availability: The ECS-based architecture and multi-AZ setup successfully handles transaction spikes and ensures continuous uptime.
• Operational Resilience: Validated Disaster Recovery capability in the Hyderabad region protects client reputation and data against regional outages.
• Enhanced Visibility: A unified observability dashboard (Grafana/CloudWatch) provides engineering teams with real-time insights into API latency, system health, and security alerts.
• Accelerated Deployment: The move to automated CI/CD pipelines reduced deployment time and minimized manual intervention errors.

Conclusion

By partnering with SquareOps, Falcon successfully transformed its legacy infrastructure into a banking-grade, cloud-native environment. The migration to AWS ECS not only ensured compliance with stringent financial regulations but also provided the scalability and resilience needed for future growth.