Case Study

Issuer Authorization Platform Resilience Program

Anonymized engagement for a high-volume issuer authorization platform with strict latency and continuity requirements.

Context

A card authorization platform operating multi-region traffic experienced rising tail latency during dependency incidents and weak isolation in custody-adjacent signing workflows.

Technical risk

Authorization throughput degraded under partial dependency failure, with unstable p95 latency.
Signing service fault boundaries were insufficiently isolated, raising compromise blast radius.
Incident recovery lacked deterministic rollback controls across critical service groups.

Intervention

Re-architected request routing and fallback control to preserve throughput under dependency instability.
Introduced stronger signing-boundary segregation and key lifecycle guardrails.
Implemented deterministic rollback gates with release-level verification checks.

Measured result

Service continuity improved during degraded-state operation.
Critical signing paths retained control under incident pressure.
Operational teams reduced restoration time for high-severity incidents.

Metric	Before	After	Change
Authorization latency p95	410 ms	165 ms	-59.8%
Signing incident MTTR	84 min	19 min	-77.4%
Failed release rollback time	43 min	8 min	-81.4%
Control coverage	62%	96%	+34 pp

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