Onboarding time: 3 hours → 2 minutes, 100% ghost account elimination
FinTech
3 weeks
Linux User Management (Fixed-Price), Cybersecurity Consulting
Manual access management across 50+ servers, ghost accounts, no audit trail
Onboarding time: 3 hours → 2 minutes, 100% ghost account elimination
A mid-sized FinTech company managing sensitive financial data across 50+ Linux servers hosted on multiple cloud providers was sitting on a security time bomb. Their rapid growth — from 10 to 45 engineers in 18 months — had outpaced their infrastructure management practices.
Access was managed manually — a spreadsheet tracked who had SSH keys on which servers, but it was perpetually outdated. When developers left the company or contractor engagements ended, their SSH keys often remained active on production servers. A quick audit revealed: • 23 SSH keys belonging to former employees and contractors still active across production systems. • 8 servers where the root password was shared among team members via a Slack channel. • No centralized record of who could access what. The security implications were severe: any former employee or contractor with lingering access could potentially exfiltrate sensitive financial data, modify transaction records, or introduce malicious code.
To process credit card transactions, the company needed PCI DSS compliance. Their first audit attempt failed on multiple access control requirements: • No documented proof of who accessed which server and when. • Shared root accounts made individual accountability impossible. • No formal process for revoking access upon personnel changes. • Password policies were non-existent — some servers still used default credentials. The auditor's report stated: "The organization cannot demonstrate adequate access controls for systems handling cardholder data."
Every new hire required manual SSH key configuration across dozens of servers. The process involved: • A senior DevOps engineer manually adding keys to each relevant server (averaging 15–25 servers per developer). • Testing access on each server individually. • Documenting the access in the shared spreadsheet (which was frequently forgotten). Total time per new hire: approximately 3 hours of senior engineer time. With the company hiring 2–3 engineers per month, this consumed an entire workday monthly — just for onboarding.
The client engaged Optimum Web's Fixed-Price Linux User Management service ($149) to standardize and automate their entire user lifecycle. The implementation was methodical and comprehensive:
For FinTech companies handling sensitive data, manual access management isn't just inefficient — it's a regulatory and security risk. Centralizing identity management with RBAC transforms a chaotic, error-prone process into a secure, auditable system. The $149 fixed-price service saved this client from what could have been a six-figure compliance failure and potential data breach.
A FinTech enterprise running on-premise .NET apps faced frequent outages and data sync issues. We migrated their entire stack to Azure with Service Bus, App Services, and automated CI/CD — achieving 99.9% uptime and 40% faster performance.
An e-commerce platform discovered 6 months of silently failing backups during a critical database corruption. We rescued 85% of the data, then implemented a multi-tier backup system with automated weekly verification that proved itself during a real hardware failure.
Every project is unique, but the problems often aren't. If this case study resonated with your situation, let's discuss how we can help.
