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Securing privileged access for High- Performance Computing in finance
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Customer

The customer is one of the world’s largest quantitative hedge funds, with approximately 1,400 employees and offices across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East. Its business is driven by technology; their competitive advantage is that they operate at the edge, leveraging the latest and most innovative technologies available to support algorithmic trading, research, and analytics at scale.
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Customer challenge: Securing Infrastructure Without Slowing Innovation 

As the customer expanded its flagship HPC environment, it needed privileged access governance without disrupting its highly automated Infrastructure-as-Code operating model.

No PAM solution was in place and so they required a platform that could:

Scale with fast-growing cloud and data center environments.

Govern all access within their critical HPC environments.

 Deploy and operate "everything-as-code" with Terraform, Temporal and APIs.

Integrate with GitLab, Ansible, Kubernetes, Okta, SIEM, CMDB, and secrets-management tools.

Audit and record privileged activity across human and automated workflows.

Secure DevOps, CI/CD, and configuration-management processes. 

Solution: Access governance for high-performance environment

The POC was completed in just two days, including deployment, integration, and full functional validation. PrivX PAM was deployed in their AWS-based HPC environment to govern privileged access across users, systems, and automated workflows.

The microservices architecture and ability to run in Kubernetes enable auto-scaling and cloud-native deployments, deployed to address human-based access, with machine-based access management in mind.

 

The initial deployment supported approximately 150 privileged users and 1,800 targets and has since expanded across two on-premise data centers, doubling the governed footprint and positioning the customer to continue scaling. 

PrivX has become part of the customer’s Infrastructure-as-Code model. Using Terraform, Temporal and APIs, the customer can manage access policies, roles, permissions, and configuration through the same automated workflows used for the rest of its infrastructure.  

Business outcomes
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Faster Time to Value 

A fully validated POC was completed in just two days, reducing evaluation time from months to days and minimizing internal effort. 

Checklist
Scalable Governance 

They easily expanded from one environment to multiple data centers, growing from 150 users / 1,800 targets to 300+ users / 3,600+ targets, with additional expansion planned. 

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Lower Operating Cost 

They identified a potential $2.5M–$3M cost avoidance opportunity by reducing reliance on expensive third-party secrets-management infrastructure and leveraging the PrivX vault. 

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Improved Engineering Velocity 

With Terraform-driven automation, new environments can be provisioned and secured in minutes; there is no manual configuration within the environment. 

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Reduced Risk and Stronger Compliance 

PrivX PAM provides just-in-time, just-enough privileged access, centralized audit trails, and session monitoring/recording across critical systems. Where possible, all standing credentials have been removed and replaced with short-lived ephemeral certificates. 

 

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Protected DevOps Workflows 

Privileged activity is governed across GitLab, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and configuration-management processes without slowing engineering teams.

Learn more about protecting HPC with PAM