Financial Services

PCI-DSS and regulatory compliant architecture for financial services with cardholder data protection.

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Overview

Financial services organizations face stringent regulatory requirements including PCI-DSS for payment card data, SOX for financial reporting, and increasingly DORA (EU) for digital operational resilience. This architecture addresses these requirements while maintaining data sovereignty.

Learning Objectives

After completing this section, you will be able to:

• ✅ Design PCI-DSS compliant Azure architectures
• ✅ Implement cardholder data environment (CDE) isolation
• ✅ Configure fraud detection with AI/ML
• ✅ Meet financial regulatory requirements

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Financial Services Architecture

_ Figure 1: PCI-DSS compliant architecture with cardholder data environment isolation

Architecture Zones

PCI Zone (Cardholder Data Environment)

The CDE is completely isolated from general workloads:

Component	Purpose	PCI Requirement
Isolated VNet	Network segmentation	1.3
Azure Firewall with IDS/IPS	Traffic filtering	1.4
WAF with OWASP rules	Application protection	6.6
Payment AKS	Hardened containers	2.2
SQL with Always Encrypted	Column-level encryption	3.4
Tokenized Storage	PAN tokenization	3.5

General Workload Zone

Non-PCI workloads with controlled access to the CDE:

• Analytics workloads (fraud detection)
• Customer-facing applications
• Back-office systems

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PCI-DSS Requirements Mapping

Requirement 1: Network Security

graph LR
    A[Internet] -->|"❌ Blocked"| B[CDE VNet]
    C[Internal Apps] -->|"Firewall<br/>Inspection"| B
    B -->|"Private<br/>Endpoints"| D[Payment Services]

    style B fill:#FFE4E1,stroke:#D13438
    style D fill:#D4E9D7,stroke:#107C10

Requirement 3: Protect Stored Data

Data Type	Protection Method	Azure Service
Primary Account Number (PAN)	Tokenization	Custom tokenization service
CVV	Never stored	N/A
Cardholder Name	Encryption	Always Encrypted
Expiration Date	Encryption	TDE + CMK

Requirement 7: Access Control

# PIM configuration for CDE access
New-AzureADMSPrivilegedAccessRole `
    -RoleName "CDE-Administrator" `
    -ResourceId "/subscriptions/{sub}/resourceGroups/pci-rg" `
    -MaxDuration "PT4H" `
    -RequireApproval $true `
    -RequireJustification $true `
    -RequireMFA $true

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Fraud Detection Architecture

Real-time Transaction Scoring

# Event Hub -> Stream Analytics -> ML Scoring
fraudDetectionPipeline:
  input:
    eventHub:
      name: "payment-transactions"
      consumerGroup: "fraud-detection"

  processing:
    streamAnalytics:
      query: |
        SELECT
          TransactionId,
          Amount,
          Location,
          CardToken,
          UDF.ScoreFraudRisk(Transaction) as RiskScore
        FROM TransactionStream
        WHERE Amount > 1000 OR Location != LastKnownLocation

  output:
    - highRiskQueue: "fraud-review"
    - dataLake: "transaction-archive"

Machine Learning Model

The fraud detection model runs in a separate non-CDE zone:

• Input: Tokenized transaction metadata (no PAN)
• Processing: Azure Databricks with ML model
• Output: Risk score (0-100)
• Action: High-risk transactions flagged for review

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HSM Key Management

Managed HSM Configuration

# Create Managed HSM for payment processing
New-AzKeyVaultManagedHsm `
    -Name "payment-hsm" `
    -ResourceGroupName "pci-keys-rg" `
    -Location "westeurope" `
    -Sku "Standard_B1" `
    -Administrator @("{security-team-object-id}")

# Create payment encryption key
Add-AzKeyVaultKey `
    -VaultName "payment-hsm" `
    -Name "card-encryption-key" `
    -KeyType "RSA-HSM" `
    -Size 4096 `
    -KeyOps @("encrypt", "decrypt", "wrapKey", "unwrapKey")

Key Rotation Policy

Key Type	Rotation Frequency	Method
Data Encryption Key (DEK)	90 days	Automatic
Key Encryption Key (KEK)	Annual	Manual with approval
TLS Certificates	1 year	Automatic via Key Vault

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DORA Compliance (EU)

For EU financial services, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) requires:

Requirement	Implementation
ICT Risk Management	Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Incident Reporting	Sentinel with custom playbooks
Resilience Testing	Azure Chaos Studio
Third-party Risk	Vendor assessment via Purview
Information Sharing	Threat intelligence integration

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Implementation Checklist

• Complete PCI-DSS SAQ or ROC
• Deploy isolated CDE VNet
• Configure Azure Firewall with IDS/IPS
• Implement tokenization service
• Deploy Managed HSM
• Configure Always Encrypted for SQL
• Enable fraud detection pipeline
• Set up PIM for privileged access
• Configure file integrity monitoring
• Schedule quarterly vulnerability scans

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Next Steps

• Government Cloud Pattern → — FedRAMP implementation
• Critical Infrastructure → — OT/IT convergence

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Reference: Azure PCI-DSS Blueprint — Microsoft Learn