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Governance & compliance
Empowering Fintech — Shipping Fast While Staying Audit-Ready
Shipping fast while staying audit-ready on Atlassian Cloud.
01
The challenge
A payments platform doubled its engineering team with SOC 2 Type II and PCI-DSS on the horizon — the exact moment most companies choose between shipping fast and staying compliant. In a ten-week phased rollout we built a third option: Jira, Jira Service Management and Confluence on Atlassian Cloud, governed by design, so delivery, service and audit evidence live in one system.
Growth was outrunning governance. Engineering headcount was set to double, a SOC 2 Type II audit and PCI-DSS obligations were both approaching, and delivery already lived in Jira while compliance lived in spreadsheets, screenshots and email threads. Audit prep meant weeks of manual screenshotting, and no single source of truth existed across teams. The brief from the VP of Engineering, Head of Security & Compliance, Head of IT and the PMO: unify delivery, service and documentation on one governed Atlassian Cloud foundation, make compliance a byproduct of daily work, and keep engineers fast — guardrails instead of gates.
02
Our approach
Governance by design, not by cleanup. We standardized delivery in Jira with project and workflow templates mapped to a clean naming taxonomy, then routed production changes through JSM change requests with approval gates before deploy. Permission schemes enforced who builds, who approves and who releases, and every change was linked to its Jira work and its approval — an audit trail that assembles itself.
On the service side, a branded portal handled access requests and incidents with approvals and SLAs, backed by a linked knowledge base so common requests self-serve before they become tickets. Evidence and policy lived in restricted, versioned Confluence spaces linked back to Jira for traceability, with dashboards for control attainment: SLA, change-approval coverage and access-review completeness.
Guardrails, not gates.
03
What we built
- Governance & control charterChange policy, RACI, and a segregation-of-duties model agreed before configuration began.
- Jira delivery templatesReusable workflow patterns and a naming taxonomy for clean roll-up reporting.
- Segregation-of-duties permissionsBuild, approve and release roles kept distinct in the permission schemes.
- JSM change managementApproval gates wired to production deploys, with every change traceable to the work that caused it.
- JSM service portalAccess requests and incidents with SLAs and approvals, plus a linked knowledge base.
- Confluence evidence & policy spacesRestricted, versioned and linked to Jira, so traceability is a property of the system.
- Automation packAudit trails, field hygiene and notifications that keep records current without chasing.
- Dashboards, runbook & trainingOngoing control visibility and a confident hand-over to control owners.
04
The results
10 weeks, phased · sequenced to land before the SOC 2 Type II observation window · each figure names its method.
- 38% shorter change lead timeFaster, safer releases without loosening control. Measured from Jira change-request timestamps, approved to deployed, on an 8-week pre/post sample.
- 100% of production changes with an approval and a trailProvable change control on every release, from the JSM change export reconciled against the deploy log.
- Audit evidence prep down from weeks to daysEvidence ready on demand instead of assembled under pressure. Measured from control-owner time-on-task logs, per control family.
- 45% of access and IT requests self-servedLess toil for IT, faster answers for staff. Measured from JSM portal deflection and automation-rule fire counts over 30 days.
Figures are illustrative and pending validation against client data.
05
In their words
We were afraid 'compliance' meant slowing down. Avaratak did the opposite — change control is now a couple of clicks, and our release cadence actually went up. Guardrails, not gates. — VP of Engineering
When the auditors arrived, there was no scramble. The evidence was already there, organized and traceable. For the first time, we walked in calm. — Head of Security & Compliance
Audit-ready on Atlassian Cloud
Ship fast and stay audit-ready
If your compliance deadlines are colliding with your growth, the fix is a platform where the evidence writes itself. Start with a compliance-ready Atlassian health check and we'll map it to your audit calendar.