2C2P Delivers Scalable and Secure Payment Processing with AWS CloudHSM

The number of transactions facilitated by 2C2P rose by up to 300 percent between 2020 and 2022. During peak periods, such as festive seasons and major sales, payment transactions would spike by as much as 600 percent. With 2C2P’s card holder authentication system deployed on an on-premises infrastructure, it was unable to accommodate the increase in traffic, which led to service disruptions every six to 12 months. Consequently, payment authentication could not be verified, impacting both consumers’ online purchases and merchants' revenue. Additionally, these disruptions often required five technicians, taking up to five hours to resolve.

Moreover, considering the sensitive financial information involved in payment transactions, the hardware security modules (HSM) had to be Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 Level-3 (FIPS 140-2 Level-3) certified for security and compliances purposes. This is a United States government computer security standard used to approve cryptographic module for protecting sensitive information. The certification’s device costs up to US$250K and required up to 12 weeks to complete. This time-consuming process impeded 2C2P’s ability to quickly and efficiently scale its on-premises resources.

The on-premises infrastructure also incurred annual expenses of up to US$50K to manage. To handle this, the company assigned two staff members for operation and maintenance, resulting in up to 16 man-hours per month set aside for system upkeep.

To address these challenges, 2C2P sought a highly secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution to enhance its infrastructure and better serve its customers.

2C2P used Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service, to process the increased transaction volumes in its card holder authentication system. With Amazon EKS, 2C2P can dynamically scale its applications by up to 20 times for high availability and uninterrupted service for its customers. This helps 2C2P meet surging payment transaction activities, all while maintaining seamless operations.

Since migrating to AWS, 2C2P is able to manage up to 100 times transactions per second, in addition to a 300 percent faster response time. As a result, the company can now support more customers and payment transactions, which in turn drives revenue growth.

With 2C2P's services being expanded across Asia Pacific, the company also harnessed AWS Global Accelerator, a service that directs user traffic to the nearest AWS endpoint. This intelligent routing minimizes latency, optimizes the payment platform's global performance, which ultimately enhances the overall customer experience with a faster transaction process.

With AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, 2C2P can now efficiently execute code without provisioning or managing servers. This means that operations and technical support staff are now freed to focus on higher-level tasks, such as innovating new services that drive business excellence.
 
On the security front, 2C2P uses AWS CloudHSM, a cloud-based HSM service, to generate, store, and manage cryptographic keys in a secure and tamper-resistant environment. By implementing FIPS 140-2 level 3-certified HSMs, the company has further fortified its data protection. Meanwhile, 2C2P also uses AWS Shield, a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service,  and AWS Secrets Manager, a cloud-based secret manager, to safeguard against evolving cyber threats. Specifically, AWS Shield helps to minimize DdoS attacks on its websites and application, and AWS Secrets Manager manages all of 2C2P’s passwords, API keys and other secrets in a single location to protect sensitive credentials and minimize vulnerabilities to critical systems. Ultimately, customers transactions are kept secure, private, and confidential.