Financial services firm modernizes security to match developer velocity

A leading consumer lending institution partnered with Modus Create to modernize its cloud security—eliminating monitoring gaps, strengthening data protection, and enabling developers to continue shipping multiple releases per day. The firm managed sensitive financial data for millions of customers, but siloed monitoring, manual reviews, and inconsistent data protections revealed critical risks. Together, we centralized visibility and embedded automated guardrails directly into CI/CD pipelines to ensure both speed and security.

Our work involved

• Securing workloads in Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Creating a centralized monitoring system
• Automating sensitive data discovery and protection
• Codifying controls in Terraform and pipelines

Impact

A code push goes live. Another follows minutes later. By the end of the day, the app experience has subtly evolved to keep up with user expectations.

This deployment cadence may be familiar to high-growth startups, but it remains uncommon among legacy financial institutions. The subject of this case study—a 100-year-old American financial institution—had increased its release frequency far faster than its security controls, creating a widening gap between release velocity and risk management.

The firm found itself at a crossroads. Its digital services were expanding rapidly, millions of customers were using its platforms, and developers were pushing updates into production several times a day. With sensitive financial data moving constantly across the cloud, the pace of deployment also came with greater risks.

Challenge

Increased risk from rapid deployment

The financial services firm had a modern suite of security tools in place, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and AWS CloudTrail—but the cybersecurity posture was fragmented.

Logs were scattered across accounts, creating monitoring gaps. Sensitive data moved between Amazon S3, databases, and applications without consistent classification or encryption. The compliance team relied on manual checks and screenshots.

Manual audits, fragmented logs, and blind spots in data protection were putting increasing pressure on engineering and compliance teams as the company scaled

Slowing down wasn’t an option. Leadership chose to enhance defenses so releases could continue at the same pace, with stronger, provable controls. The firm engaged Modus Create to design a cohesive cybersecurity environment without halting deployment.

Solution

A layered security environment aligned with deployment speed

Our team of AWS and security experts worked side-by-side with the financial services firm to rebuild defenses into the company’s operating model, designing controls that complemented existing workflows rather than slowing them down.

Step 1: Fortifying the security foundation

We rebuilt the network architecture to establish clear trust boundaries and reduce exposure across all environments. This included segmented VPCs, hardened security groups, and resilient ingress via Amazon Route 53 and Application Load Balancer. Customer-facing workloads ran on Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Redis. The result was a significantly stronger security baseline with no impact on the team’s rapid release cadence.

Step 2: Extending visibility and control

Together, we addressed blind spots in the security infrastructure. We centralized AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch logs and funneled Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Inspector findings into a single source of truth with extended retention. This gave security end-to-end visibility, faster investigations, and smoother audits.

Step 3: Automating protection in the pipelines

To ensure protection was built into the release process, the team embedded automated guardrails directly into CI/CD. Amazon Macie scanned S3 in real time to detect PII and account data before it landed in storage, while AWS KMS enforced consistent encryption across databases, logs, and backups. We codified policies in Terraform so every change carried the same proven controls—peer‑reviewed, versioned, and approved automatically—integrating with existing developer workflows rather than bolting on checks after deployment.

Impact

Strengthened security that keeps pace with releases

The security modernization delivered on its promise of a stronger posture that kept pace with releases. The gains were immediate and visible:

• Preserving deployment velocity: Multiple daily releases continued with 0 disruption.
• Streamlining compliance operations: Automated evidence and controls delivered a 99% reduction in manual audit tasks.
• Enhancing security agility: 40% reduction in vulnerability remediation time, freeing developers to focus on features and cybersecurity teams to focus on strategy.
• Improving audit readiness: Extended log retention and centralized monitoring created a single source of truth, accelerating investigations and making audit prep a routine task instead of a fire drill.
• Standardizing data protection: Sensitive financial records were consistently classified and encrypted, ensuring regulatory compliance and reinforcing customer trust at scale.

Today, the financial services firm’s security has evolved from a checkpoint to an integral part of its operating rhythm. By embedding defenses directly into development, the company created a cloud environment where speed and trust coexist—strengthening regulatory confidence, reducing operational risk, and enabling the business to scale digital products without fear of slowing down.