About the Customer

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A leading payment infrastructure provider in Nigeria serves as the backbone of the country's electronic payment ecosystem, processing millions of transactions daily across banks, fintech companies, and government agencies. Operating critical payment switching and settlement systems, this institution maintains the infrastructure that enables real-time payments, interbank transfers, and digital financial services for over 200 million Nigerians.

With responsibility for Nigeria's central payment systems including instant payment networks and interbank settlement services, the organization manages highly sensitive financial data and maintains strict regulatory compliance requirements under Central Bank of Nigeria oversight.

Customer Challenge

As Nigeria's digital payment ecosystem expanded rapidly in early 2025, the payment infrastructure provider faced mounting challenges in managing privileged access across their multi-cloud AWS environment. Their legacy access management processes were struggling to keep pace with the growing complexity of their infrastructure.

The institution operated across multiple AWS accounts to segregate different payment services — from real-time payment processing to batch settlement systems. Manual processes for granting elevated access to these critical systems created significant security and operational risks. Engineers and administrators often retained standing privileges longer than necessary, violating the principle of least privilege and creating potential attack vectors.

During a routine compliance audit in February 2025, regulators identified gaps in the organization's privileged access governance. The audit revealed that temporary access for system maintenance and incident response lacked proper approval workflows and comprehensive audit trails. With processing over 5 million transactions daily, any security breach or compliance failure could have devastating impacts on Nigeria's entire payment ecosystem.

The organization's security team struggled with:

• Manual Access Provisioning — Requests for elevated AWS access required manual coordination between security teams and administrators, often taking hours to fulfill during incidents
• Standing Privileges — Developers and operations staff maintained persistent elevated access to production systems, creating unnecessary exposure
• Audit Trail Gaps — Limited visibility into who accessed what systems and when, making compliance reporting difficult and investigations time-consuming
• Multi-Account Complexity — Managing consistent access policies across dozens of AWS accounts used for different payment services proved challenging
• Emergency Access Delays — During outages, delayed access provisioning extended incident resolution times, impacting millions of customers

Partner Solution

In March 2025, the payment infrastructure provider partnered with Qucoon, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, to implement QTEAM (Qucoon’s Temporary Elevated Access Manager) — a comprehensive Just-In-Time access management solution designed for AWS environments.

The implementation journey began with a detailed assessment of the organization's existing access patterns and security requirements. The QTEAM solution was deployed across the institution's multi-account AWS infrastructure, providing centralized management of temporary elevated access while maintaining strict security controls.

Core QTEAM Implementation

The solution established a robust request-and-approval workflow where staff could request temporary elevated access by specifying the AWS account, required permission set, duration, and business justification through an intuitive web interface hosted on AWS Fargate. All requests required approval from designated administrators, with built-in prevention mechanisms to ensure users could not approve their own requests.

Automated Credential Management

QTEAM automatically generated unique, time-bound AWS IAM credentials for each approved request. Credentials were delivered securely via encrypted PDF documents and expired at the end of the approved access window. Multiple fallback mechanisms, including AWS EventBridge-based cleanup automation, guaranteed that no credentials remained active beyond their timeframe.

Comprehensive Audit Integration

The solution integrated with AWS CloudTrail to provide complete activity correlation. Every action performed with QTEAM-issued credentials was linked back to the original access request, with all audit data stored in Amazon DynamoDB for fast querying and compliance reporting. This created an immutable audit trail that satisfied regulatory requirements while enabling rapid investigation.

Real-Time Notifications and Monitoring

Automated email notifications via AWS SES kept stakeholders informed of request status changes. The security team accessed a dashboard hosted on AWS Fargate, providing real-time visibility into all requests, approvals, and active sessions.

Emergency Access Capabilities

For critical incidents, QTEAM supported urgency-based prioritization, enabling rapid access provisioning while still maintaining approval workflows and audit trails.

The solution leveraged AWS Lambda for serverless scalability, DynamoDB for audit storage, AWS Fargate for hosting, and AWS KMS for encryption. Together, these services ensured secure, scalable, and seamless access management.

Primary AWS Services Used

• AWS Lambda — Serverless execution of workflows
• Amazon DynamoDB — High-performance audit data storage
• AWS Fargate — Serverless container hosting for the frontend
• AWS IAM — Dynamic role creation for temporary access
• AWS EventBridge — Automated credential cleanup
• AWS SES — Real-time notifications
• AWS CloudTrail — Activity logging and audit trails
• AWS KMS — Encryption of sensitive data
• Amazon API Gateway — Secure REST API integration
• AWS Secrets Manager — Credential management
• Amazon CloudWatch — Monitoring and alerts

Results and Benefits

The QTEAM implementation, completed in June 2025, delivered transformative improvements in security posture and operational efficiency.

Security Enhancements

• 100% Elimination of Standing Privileges — All elevated access became time-bounded, reducing persistent attack surface to zero
• Sub-Minute Access Provisioning — Emergency access during incidents reduced from hours to under 60 seconds
• 99.8% Compliance Score — Automated audit trail generation achieved near-perfect compliance ratings during the September 2025 review

Operational Improvements

• 80% Reduction in Security Team Workload — Automated workflows eliminated manual credential management overhead
• Complete Activity Visibility — Every privileged action became traceable to approved requests, with DynamoDB enabling sub-second queries
• Zero Credential Leakage — Expiration mechanisms eliminated risks of forgotten or lingering access
• Seamless User Experience — The Fargate-hosted interface scaled automatically with 24/7 availability

Business Impact

• Enhanced Incident Response — Faster provisioning reduced resolution time by 40%
• Regulatory Compliance — Comprehensive audit trails streamlined reporting and examinations
• Risk Mitigation — Eliminating standing privileges reduced insider threat exposure

The solution scaled to support over 500 technical staff across departments, processing thousands of access requests monthly while maintaining sub-second response times and 99.99% system availability.

About the Partner

Qucoon is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner specializing in enterprise security and cloud infrastructure solutions. With expertise in privileged access management and compliance, Qucoon helps financial institutions and critical infrastructure providers secure their environments while maintaining operational efficiency.

Through innovative solutions like QTEAM, Qucoon enables organizations to adopt Zero Trust security models, eliminate standing privileges, and achieve comprehensive audit compliance across AWS environments.