The client is a major US title insurance and real estate transaction services provider, operating across multiple states with a distributed technology footprint of 250–300 endpoints.
The challenges
As cyber threats, wire fraud risks, and regulatory expectations grew across the real estate industry, the organization needed a unified, secure, and compliant cloud foundation. Their decentralized IT setup, legacy security controls, and fragmented monitoring made it difficult to achieve the visibility, consistency, and automation required to meet ALTA Best Practices, NIST, and emerging DORA standards. The existing cloud and security environment had evolved over time without standardized controls or governance, leading to several operational and compliance gaps.
Fragmented cloud architecture
Workloads were spread inconsistently across environments, lacking standardized landing zones, strong network segmentation, and automated governance. This reduced scalability and increased configuration drift.
Security gaps across IAM and workloads
Access controls, encryption policies, and workload-level protections were inconsistent. Misconfigurations created risks around data exposure, compliance violations, and potential breach scenarios.
Dispersed monitoring and limited threat visibility
Logs and security events were siloed across tools, making it difficult to detect threats early. Analysts struggled with slow investigation cycles and limited cross-system correlation.
Manual incident handling
Incident response relied heavily on manual triage. This slowed remediation, increased operational overhead, and contributed to analyst fatigue.
Regulatory pressure
Compliance with ALTA, NIST, FedRAMP, and state-specific real estate regulations required significant manual effort due to the absence of a unified compliance and audit framework.
Alert overload and high operational costs
Lack of correlation created excessive alert noise. Without FinOps practices, cloud spend visibility was minimal, increasing operating costs.
Solution
We executed a Cloud Security & Observability Assessment and implemented targeted improvements across four critical domains: Cloud Architecture, Cloud Security, DevSecOps, and CloudOps & Governance.
Cloud Architecture and Engineering
- Assessed existing landing zones and resource distribution
- Proposed a standardized, enterprise-grade landing zone with improved segmentation
- Strengthened automated governance guardrails for consistent deployments
- Recommended optimized workload placement to improve performance and reduce costs
Cloud Security
- Conducted a CSPM-led gap analysis across IAM, encryption, resource configurations, and key management
- Strengthened cloud controls aligned with DORA, NIST, ALTA, and FedRAMP frameworks
- Improved identity hygiene, encryption policies, and security baselines across workloads
DevSecOps
- Enhanced CI/CD pipelines with automated secure code scanning and policy enforcement
- Shifted security left by embedding security gates throughout the development lifecycle
- Reduced manual deployment risk with automated workflows for cloud-native applications
- Standardized DevSecOps practices for continuous, compliant delivery
CloudOps and Governance
- Assessed existing observability, incident management, and cloud spend patterns
- Implemented FinOps strategies for budget control, optimization, and cost visibility
- Introduced automated monitoring and cost management to reduce manual operations
- Recommended improvements to incident workflows, alert routing, and runbook automation
Impact
- Cost and governance
Reduced manual oversight and improved financial accountability across cloud environments - Operational efficiency
30% reduction in infrastructure costs - Visibility and audit readiness
Improved audit readiness, risk reporting, and executive visibility - Compliance adherence
Azure policy compliance improved from 11% to 75%, strengthening alignment with ALTA, NIST, and industry regulations - Incident response
Reduced alert noise and improved response time by 45% - Automation and agility
Automated playbooks and CI/CD enhancements enabled 60% faster cloud-native deployments
