From Microservices to Micropayments, Ame Relies on Palo Alto Networks and AWS to Drive Innovation

Brazilian FinTech Ame Digital (Ame) is experiencing incredible growth in a highly competitive market. Therefore, its development team must deliver innovative cloud-first mobile and web applications as fast as possible, and its cybersecurity team needs to keep up. With Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud, the Ame cybersecurity team has complete visibility into their Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, workloads, containers, and microservices—enabling them to secure applications and integration without affecting delivery. With Palo Alto Networks Strata, Ame Digital can secure VPN connections for remote workers while offering comprehensive admission control and traffic inspection.

In the cloud and in stores, Ame brings banking, credit, loan, and payment services to anyone in Brazil who wants them. The fast-growing company has more than million customers and 3 million connected merchants. In less than 5 months (from December 2020 to May 2021), it has acquired three companies to expand its services. To stay competitive, Ame needs to offer innovative financial services like QR code payment, cashback, and product recommendations based on customer history at an accelerated pace. Ame’s security team—searching for ways to make code and apps work properly and safely without delaying releases—turned to Palo Alto Networks, AWS, and AWS Marketplace.

Because Ame’s development hinges on microservices and containers, it uses AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EKS. To address the need to check and monitor developer work, microservices, and application security and viability, Ame chose Prisma Cloud, which it runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and uses with the other AWS services. Prisma Cloud can ingest all major AWS APIs for centralized policy management and security visibility, while providing full lifecycle security that spans build, deploy, and run, along with IaC templates and images, functions, and AMIs. Ame also uses Strata for its firewalls and secure access service edge.

Because its market is so competitive, Ame can’t afford to use an approach where development teams take 2-3 months to create applications and then security steps in afterwards to check them. Prisma Cloud provides coverage for all its software and workloads in a single view. As a result, it’s easy for Daniel Neto, the chief Information security officer (CISO) at Ame, and his team to manage security in a continuous delivery environment. The networking security group can see everything, including AWS Fargate servers, Lambda services, and more.

“It’s all one interface. We can use it to start an investigation, or look at a business unit dashboard, or check compliance. All my teams and internal customers can use the same tool in different ways,” said Neto.

What Ame really likes about working with Palo Alto Networks is the flexibility of its solutions. Palo Alto Networks is always willing to help Ame deploy solutions that deliver better ways for developers and the security groups to work together. The goal is to help Ame’s development and security teams take a DevSecOps and “shift left” approach, share the same information quickly and easily, and ensure that there are no bottlenecks in impending releases. Ame’s security team can see what the developers are building—without having to deal with different languages for the same problem or risks—and offer helpful feedback before a build is complete.

Ame uses Strata, the Palo Alto Networks virtual firewall, to protect workloads and its branch offices or secure remote connections. Strata also helps deliver the micro-segmentation need in parts of its software and architecture. To address tight regulations and to enable the business, Ame needs unwavering visibility. With Palo Alto Networks Strata and Prisma Cloud, Ame has felt confident about its level of visibility and protection from the very beginning.