Moving Fast Broke Your Access Controls. Here Is How to Fix Them Without Stopping the Product.

The CTO knows the authentication architecture needs work. The access review flagged it last quarter. The RBI IT Governance Master Direction makes it a regulatory requirement. The Series A investor mentioned it in the last board meeting. 

The sprint planning for next month is already full. 

This is the conversation at every fintech company between seed and Series B: security needs to happen, but not at the cost of shipping the product. The assumption underneath it is that deploying MFA is a large, disruptive project that will consume engineering cycles, generate developer complaints, and require changes to production systems. 

That assumption is wrong about the first phase. 

Where the Highest Risk Lives, and How Small that Population is 

For Indian fintechs, the highest-risk authentication surface is typically the smallest population: privileged administrator accounts with access to payment processing systems, core lending platforms, and customer data repositories. Deploying phishing-resistant MFA on this population typically takes one week and does not require product changes, production system modifications, or engineering team involvement. 

The product team does not notice Phase 1. The CERT-In auditor does. 

What Phase 1 and Phase 2 Close 

Phase 1 is privileged access. Every administrator account, domain administrator, database administrator, and infrastructure engineer. Cisco Duo, Cisco's identity security platform, deploys via Verified Push on the Duo Mobile app. No hardware. No production changes. One week. 

Phase 2 is vendor and third-party remote access. RADIUS integration with the existing VPN concentrator. Time-limited vendor credentials with formal renewal. The third-party payment provider integration running on shared credentials since go-live gets named individual accounts and a 30-day expiry. Two weeks. 

RBI IT Governance Master Direction requirements for MFA on critical systems and DPDPA reasonable security safeguards obligations can both be addressed in stages, starting with privileged access and vendor remote access before extending to the broader developer population. The regulatory exposure closes in the first two phases. The product team ships two sprints. Nobody notices. 

What Phase 3 Looks Like 

Developer access to production environments, payment processing system authentication, and client-facing API access. This is where the engineering team is involved. This is also the phase that typically takes four to six weeks in a fintech environment with 100 to 500 developers. 

In Proactive's Cisco Duo deployments across fintech environments in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi NCR, Phase 3 runs alongside product development without blocking it. The sequencing is the point. Not everything at once. The highest risk first. Everything else in order. 

Proactive is a Cisco Preferred Security Partner deploying Cisco Duo for Indian fintechs across Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi NCR: phased deployments, RBI and DPDPA compliance, and authentication architecture that scales with product velocity. 

The sprint planning is full. Phase 1 fits in the gaps. 

Talk to a Proactive Cisco Duo specialist. Write to [email protected].