Challenge

The US-based FinTech company faced significant hurdles in maintaining compliance across its dynamic cloud environment. With 300+ microservices running across AWS and Azure, manual processes were no longer sustainable. The security team struggled with 35% of cloud resources drifting out of compliance between audits, while critical policy violations took 72+ hours to detect. These gaps created regulatory risks and operational bottlenecks, particularly as the company prepared for FFIEC and SOC 2 audits, which demanded exhaustive evidence collection. The existing workflow—reliant on spreadsheets and periodic scans—consumed $300K annually in labor and remediation costs, delaying product launches and diverting engineering resources from innovation to firefighting.

Solution

To address these challenges, we implemented a compliance-as-code framework designed for real-time enforcement and automation. The solution centered on Open Policy Agent (OPA) and HashiCorp Sentinel, embedded directly into Terraform and Azure Bicep pipelines to block non-compliant infrastructure before deployment. We integrated AWS Config and Azure Policy for continuous monitoring, ensuring violations like unencrypted storage or overly permissive IAM roles were flagged within 5 minutes. Self-healing workflows automated fixes for common issues, while Prisma Cloud and Datadog provided unified dashboards to track compliance posture across both clouds. Crucially, we automated audit evidence generation, slashing the time required to prepare for FFIEC, PCI-DSS, and SOC 2 audits from weeks to a single day.

Implementation

The rollout followed a phased approach to minimize disruption while delivering immediate value. During the 3-week discovery phase, we identified high-risk areas (e.g., IAM, data encryption) and mapped them to regulatory requirements. A 4-week pilot focused on enforcing policies for AWS S3, IAM, and Azure SQL, with Prisma Cloud providing visibility into violations. The 10-week global rollout expanded coverage to all 300 microservices, including training for 30+ engineers on policy-as-code practices. Finally, a 3-week optimization phase refined auto-remediation scripts and tailored executive dashboards in Datadog. Throughout, we prioritized "fail secure" guardrails—for example, blocking deployments that violated encryption policies—while maintaining flexibility for legitimate exceptions via automated exemption workflows.

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Results & Impact

The client reported a 60% decrease in compliance-related issues and improved audit readiness. The implementation of automated compliance enforcement delivered measurable, organization-wide improvements across security, efficiency, and cost savings. Most critically, compliance violations dropped by 80%, from 35% of cloud resources being non-compliant to a sustained rate of under 7%. This dramatic reduction was achieved through real-time policy enforcement, which cut detection times for violations from 72 hours to under 5 minutes—ensuring issues were addressed before they could escalate into regulatory risks.

Operational efficiency saw equally impressive gains. Audit preparation time shrank from 4 weeks to just 1 day, as the system auto-generated compliance reports with all necessary evidence for FFIEC, PCI-DSS, and SOC 2 audits. This not only eliminated last-minute scrambles but also reduced annual compliance costs by 83%—from 300Ktojust300Ktojust50K. The self-healing workflows further slashed manual effort, automatically fixing 75% of common compliance issues (like unencrypted storage or overly permissive IAM roles) without engineer intervention.

Beyond metrics, the solution enabled tangible business outcomes:

• Zero compliance-related delays in product releases over 12 months
• Faster cloud onboarding for new teams (from 2 weeks to 1 hour)
• Stronger regulator relationships thanks to transparent, real-time reporting

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Key Takeaways

✔ Compliance-as-Code is a Competitive Advantage – Automated enforcement reduced risk while accelerating releases.

✔ Real-Time > Retroactive Checks – Continuous monitoring prevented $500K+ in potential fines.

✔ Self-Healing Saves Thousands – Auto-remediation cut manual work by 75%.

✔ Regulators Prefer Automation – Audit evidence is now generated instantly, improving examiner trust.