Deploying a Secure, PCI-DSS Compliant Cloud Operations Baseline for PAYSTRAX

Challenge

PAYSTRAX is a Payment Card Acquirer providing secure, tailored payment solutions for
merchants across Europe and the UK. The company holds Principal Membership licences
with Mastercard and Visa and is an authorised Payment Institution in both the EU and the
UK. In 2026, PAYSTRAX ranked 148th in the Financial Times FT1000: Europe’s Fastest
Growing Companies.

As one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs, PAYSTRAX needed a cloud infrastructure
capable of supporting rapid international expansion while maintaining the highest standards
of security and regulatory compliance. Together with Cloud Office, the company built a
modern AWS foundation designed for resilience, scalability, and long-term growth.

Customer Challenge
PAYSTRAX required a cloud environment capable of supporting increasing
transaction volumes while meeting the strict security and compliance requirements of the
payments industry. Future growth had to be supported without compromising operational
resilience, governance, or merchant trust.

Given the nature of their business, the operational baseline had to be incredibly resilient,
scalable, and built strictly to PCI-DSS compliance standards. Any architectural missteps or
lack of preventative governance guardrails would not only fail compliance audits but could
lead to catastrophic data breaches and permanent loss of merchant trust.

Solution

Rather than simply deploying infrastructure, Cloud Office worked closely with PAYSTRAX to
design a cloud operating model that would support both current operations and future
growth. Every architectural decision was made with scalability, security, and operational
efficiency in mind, enabling PAYSTRAX to focus on delivering payment solutions while
relying on an automated, highly governed cloud foundation.

We laid the groundwork by deploying a multi-account AWS Landing Zone via AWS Control
Tower, enforcing robust organizational Service Control Policies (SCPs), centralized logging,
and strict environment separation to satisfy financial auditing requirements.

To ensure operational agility and minimize maintenance overhead, we designed their
payment processing architecture around Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
running on AWS Fargate. This serverless compute model allowed the platform to handle
high-volume transaction spikes without requiring PAYSTRAX' team to manually provision or operate virtual machines.

The complete solution design - including the advanced networking, security controls, and the
containerized application layer - was entirely automated and provisioned using Terraform to
ensure flawless, repeatable deployments.

Result

Cloud Office successfully delivered a highly governed, scalable cloud foundation aligned
with PAYSTRAX’s PCI-DSS requirements. By leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC),
serverless container operations, and automated governance, PAYSTRAX established a
resilient, low-maintenance cloud environment capable of securely processing high-volume
financial transactions across Europe.

The new AWS foundation provides a secure, scalable platform that supports PAYSTRAX’s
continued growth while reducing operational overhead through automation. With governance
embedded from day one and infrastructure deployed as code, the company can introduce
new services faster, maintain compliance more efficiently, and confidently scale its payment
processing operations as transaction volumes continue to grow.