The challenge
A fast-growing European challenger bank had outgrown its initial cloud-native architecture. With customer count tripling year-over-year and increasing scrutiny from financial regulators, the platform needed:
- A PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider ready edge architecture
- Sub-200ms TTFB across Europe
- A serious answer to DDoS and credential stuffing
- Workload-level isolation for cardholder data environments
The existing stack — a single-region cloud provider’s WAF and CDN combination — couldn’t deliver any of these at the required level.
The approach
We led a 14-week migration to Akamai, structured in four phases:
Weeks 1-2: Discovery
Full traffic profiling, attack pattern analysis, and a current-state architecture review. We mapped every dependency for the cardholder data environment in preparation for microsegmentation.
Weeks 3-6: Edge deployment
Phased migration of traffic onto Akamai, starting with public marketing pages, then customer-facing app routes, and finally authenticated session traffic. App & API Protector and Bot Manager were deployed with custom rule tuning specific to fintech threat patterns.
Weeks 7-10: Microsegmentation
Akamai Guardicore agents deployed across the cardholder data environment. Policies designed and validated in observation mode, then rolled to enforcement on the most sensitive workloads first.
Weeks 11-14: Hardening and handover
False-positive review cycles, performance tuning, and full handover to the customer’s SOC with our 24/7 managed services team as ongoing backup.
The results
Two years post-launch, the bank has experienced zero outages — through three regional cloud provider incidents that took down peers.
Page load performance improved 4x at the P75 — moving from average TTFB of 480ms to 110ms across European markets. Origin egress dropped 60%, more than paying for the engagement.
The bank’s most recent PCI audit was completed in eight weeks instead of the previous twelve, with the QSA citing the segmentation evidence trail as best-in-class.
What made it work
Three things, in our view:
- A senior architect from day one. Not a project manager handing off to engineers — the same person owning the design from discovery to handover.
- Phased enforcement. Nothing went to production without a controlled rollback path. The team built confidence iteratively.
- Operational handover, not just deployment. The customer’s internal team now operates the platform with our team as escalation support — which is sustainable in a way that pure managed services often isn’t.