PayU Helps Customers Make Secure Online Payments Faster by Streamlining Firewall Management on AWS

The online payments industry is expanding quickly worldwide, with Asia-Pacific dominating the global payments revenue pool. According to a 2021 McKinsey report, global payments businesses are expected to generate revenue of $2.5 trillion by 2025.

 

PayU is a financial technology company capitalizing on this growth. The fintech provides payment gateway solutions, such as the PayUbiz online payment gateway and Citrus UPI mobile app, to online businesses globally, including leading ecommerce companies and airlines. It processes around 1.2 million payments every day and serves over 4.5 million merchants across India with more than 100 payment methods.

PayU has been running its application environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2015, taking advantage of the scalability and agility of the AWS Cloud to fuel business growth. While the company continued to move workloads to AWS, it relied on a third-party on-premises firewall solution—which separated the main console and gateway—to secure its network. This caused challenges for PayU’s platform and infrastructure engineering team, as connecting its physical data center to AWS, and managing both environments proved to be tedious.

 

Relying on an on-premises data center also made compliance time-consuming. PayU must ensure Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance to protect cardholders’ personal information. PayU’s network security manager says, “We had to manage compliance ourselves—especially for solutions deployed on premises—and use different vendors for auditing. The vendors would have to physically come to the data center and test our workloads, completing a very detailed audit before we received clearance.”

 

PayU also had challenges scaling the on-premises firewall solution during busy holiday seasons, when customer traffic spikes. During these periods, PayU witnessed thousands of additional transactions per day. Its firewall solution couldn’t support the load, resulting in performance issues and customers having to wait longer for transactions to go through.

After several discussions with AWS architects, PayU decided on a solution that could offer better performance and native integration with its AWS application environment. It worked closely with AWS to implement AWS Network Firewall, a managed service that simplifies deployment of network protections for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). AWS Network Firewall features a flexible rules engine that lets users define managed and open-source firewall rules, allowing fine-grained control over network traffic to prevent the spread of malicious activity.

 

PayU deployed AWS Global Accelerator, a networking service designed to improve the performance of user traffic flowing through AWS Global Infrastructure. It optimizes application latency when the network is congested and improves availability by providing two global static public IPs.

 

PayU also ensured its payment gateway and application traffic moves directly through AWS, via AWS Network Firewall and AWS Global Accelerator. The company is also leveraging AWS Enterprise Support, allowing them to resolve issues faster with a single point of contact, compared to previously having to liaise with multiple vendors.

Implementing AWS Network Firewall and AWS Global Accelerator has improved performance for PayU’s PayUbiz and Citrus UPI applications. Following the migration to AWS, PayU saw its application response time halve from 800 to 400 milliseconds.

 

With this 50 percent reduction, PayU’s customers experience improved transaction and application performance. This is important for the business because today’s customers expect seamless interactions and fast payments.

The PayU platform and infrastructure engineering team has also streamlined firewall management on AWS. According to the head of network security at PayU, “AWS Network Firewall and AWS Global Accelerator have reduced management complexity, because there’s no more manual effort involved. We have more flexibility to control access to hybrid environments and better manage traffic layers.” PayU has also decreased IT expenditure via a single integrated solution versus paying licensing and management costs to several vendors.

 

The AWS solution scales automatically with network traffic, so PayU no longer needs to spend time deploying and managing infrastructure when application traffic spikes during the busy holiday season.

Additionally, PayU has strengthened overall security. Protection from potential intrusions is now enhanced, giving the company more confidence than before.

 

With AWS Network Firewall and AWS Global Accelerator being PCI-compliant, PayU has decreased the time to complete compliance audits. Now, PayU receives PCI reports on demand, which the company can present to auditors whenever necessary. As a result, PayU is reducing compliance audits from days to minutes.