Enhancing FinTech Infrastructure with Secure, Scalable AWS Solutions

Miden is a financial technology company dedicated to empowering businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond with tools for payment processing and infrastructure management. Specializing in card issuance, banking as a service (BaaS), and global payments, Miden provides a comprehensive, API-driven platform enabling companies to streamline their financial operations. With Miden’s technology, businesses can issue virtual and physical cards, automate payments, and manage expenses with complete visibility and control, all within a secure, scalable, and PCI-DSS-compliant framework.

Through its commitment to advancing financial inclusion, Miden is driving growth for businesses by offering reliable, efficient, and innovative financial services designed to meet global standards and deliver a seamless user experience.

Executive summary

As Miden, a rising FinTech startup, expands its role in enabling seamless financial transactions for African businesses, verifying that there are no infrastructure gaps has become essential. Miden engaged Hostersi to conduct an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review aimed at validating the integrity of its AWS infrastructure, which was originally built by Miden's internal experts. The review focused on ensuring that Miden’s infrastructure aligns with AWS best practices in areas such as security, performance, scalability, and cost optimization.

This validation is especially critical as Miden acquires new customers and builds trust in the highly competitive FinTech space, where even minor technical issues can impact customer experience and growth. By partnering with Hostersi, Miden reinforced its AWS cloud foundation, ensuring scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency to support its long-term vision and operational success.

Key Focus Areas for the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review:

Security and Compliance

In the highly regulated FinTech space, ensuring the infrastructure meets security and compliance standards is critical. Miden must protect sensitive financial data and customer transactions, so validating security configurations and identifying potential vulnerabilities is essential to prevent breaches and maintain customer trust.

Performance Optimization and Reliability:

Miden’s platform must deliver high performance while ensuring consistent reliability as it scales. Evaluating the architecture to identify potential performance bottlenecks, ensuring fault tolerance, and optimizing resources are essential to maintaining smooth financial operations, especially under growing transaction volumes and user demand.

Expert Validation and Improvement Opportunities:

Having external AWS experts review the infrastructure provides an unbiased evaluation,

uncovering potential improvement areas that internal teams may overlook. This external perspective ensures that Miden's infrastructure aligns with AWS Best Practices and can handle future growth without compromising performance, security, or reliability.

Why engage Hostersi in AWS Well-Architected Framework Review?

By engaging Hostersi, an AWS Well-Architected Partner, clients ensure their infrastructure aligns with AWS Best Practices. Our AWS Well-Architected Review provides a thorough evaluation, pinpointing critical improvement areas that internal teams may overlook. Our partnership with AWS customers goes beyond the review process. We collaborate on implemen- tation, facilitate discussions, and build lasting relationships. Hostersi fosters an environment for clients to return for ongoing consultation and guidance on their IT infrastructure. Additionally, we offer hands-on technical support through our DevOps or Managed Services, ensuring clients have the expertise to meet evolving needs.

Insights from WAFR Discussions with Miden

Multi-Account Strategy

Hostersi provided the Miden team with valuable insights on best practices related to a Multi-Ac- count Strategy within AWS, emphasizing how this approach strengthens security, governance, and compliance. Through a Multi-Account Strategy, organizations can contain the impact of potential security incidents by isolating workloads in specific accounts, reducing the risk to the rest of the infrastructure.

This strategy also supports centralized governance by ensuring that permissions, policies, and access controls are consistently applied across all AWS accounts. In terms of compliance, a Multi-Account setup allows for consolidated auditing, which enhances visibility, accountability, and regulatory adherence.

Proactive Security

Hostersi provided the Miden team with insights on implementing proactive security strategies to build a resilient security framework that adapts to evolving threats and reduces organizational risk. Key strategies included:

• Regular review of trusted sources of threat intelligence
• Research on tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) employed by adversaries
• Monitoring of lists of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs)

Infrastructure deployment automation

Hostersi provided the Miden team with insights on best practices for infrastructure deployment automation in multi-region setups to drive consistency, scalability, and cost efficiency. Automating infrastructure deployment brings a range of benefits:

• Elimination of human error: Automated deployment ensures the infrastructure is configured consistently across regions, reducing the risk that can occur with manual setups.
• Repeatable environments: Automation allows you to create identical environments in different regions, ensuring uniformity and minimizing discrepancies between regions.
• Easy scaling across regions and rapid deployment across multiple regions simultaneously
• Standardized security policies
• Centralized management and integrated monitoring and logging

Moving from Microservices towards EKS

Hostersi provided the Miden team with guidance on determining the optimal time to transition to EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) as their microservices architecture grows in complexity. Kubernetes on EKS offers powerful orchestration, automation, and management capabilities, which are essential for efficiently handling larger microservice environments, particularly those spanning multiple clouds or regions. However, Hostersi advised that for smaller or less complex architectures, the overhead of Kubernetes may be unnecessary.

To ensure a successful migration to EKS, Hostersi highlighted the importance of team expertise in several critical areas:

• Container Orchestration Skills: Fundamental for effective use of Kubernetes.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Knowledge of IaC tools to manage infrastructure more efficiently, particularly in automated and scalable environments.
• Kubernetes-Specific Security Best Practices: To keep the platform secure as it scales.

About AWS Well-Architected Framework Review

The AWS Well-Architected Framework Review offers an opportunity to evaluate and optimize your infrastructure. Leveraging Hostersi's extensive experience with a wide range of customers and applications, our team of AWS Certified Solutions Architects provides guidance on best practices across six key pillars. Through an initial discovery meeting, we identify specific questions to drive a meaningful discussion with AWS clients, ensuring our recommendations align with each customer’s business maturity, roadmap, technical environment, and internal capabilities.

Understanding the 6 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review

1. Security

Security is critical in the cloud, and this pillar emphasizes protecting data, systems, and assets. Important considerations include:

• Identity and access management: Implementing strict access controls to ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive data.
• Data protection: Encrypting data at rest and in transit, and regularly reviewing security policies to adapt to evolving threats.
• Incident response: Establishing procedures to quickly respond to security incidents, minimizing potential impacts.

2. Performance Efficiency

This pillar emphasizes using resources efficiently to meet system requirements while maintaining flexibility for growth. Key practices include:

• Selecting the right resource types: Choosing appropriate instance types and sizes based on workload requirements.
• Monitoring performance: Regularly analyzing system perfor- mance metrics to identify areas for optimization.
• Cost management: Leveraging AWS services and features to reduce costs while maintaining performance

3. Cost Optimization

Cost optimization focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs and maximizing the value of AWS services. Important strategies include:

• Resource allocation: Right-sizing resources to match workload demands and reduce waste.
• Utilizing pricing models: Taking advantage of AWS pricing models, such as reserved instances and spot instances, to save costs.
• Monitoring and analysis: Continuously reviewing and analyzing usage patterns to identify opportunities for cost savings.

4. Operational Excellence

Operational excellence focuses on the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and continually improve process- es and procedures. Key best practices include:

• Monitoring and incident response: Implementing monitoring systems to detect issues and automate incident response.
• Change management: Managing changes effectively through automation and version control to ensure smooth operations.
• Regularly reviewing and refining: Continuously evaluating operations to enhance performance and reliability.

5. Reliability

Reliability focuses on ensuring a system can recover from failures and meet customer demands. Best practices in this pillar include:

• Designing for failure: Building systems that can withstand failures, using redundancy and failover strategies to ensure availability.
• Backup and recovery: Implementing regular backup procedures and testing recovery plans to ensure data integrity.
• Load balancing and scaling: Using automated scaling solutions to manage varying workloads effectively.

6. Sustainability

The sustainability pillar emphasizes minimizing the environmental impact of cloud architecture. Key considerations include:

• Efficient resource utilization: Efficient use of resources, reducing energy consumption and waste.
• Carbon footprint tracking
• Sustainable architecture: Leveraging AWS services and features that support sustainability goals, such as serverless computing, which can help reduce energy consumption by optimizing resource use.

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