TotalNet modernizes its financial platform with Azure Active Directory B2C deployment

TotalNet is a Uruguayan payment acceptance, authorization, and processing services company. Its primary objective is to provide merchants with state-of-the-art payment solutions and tools for handling card transactions, providing advice, and technological and commercial support to ensure the security and efficiency of their operations.

For more than 25 years, Visanet, now known as TotalNet, worked as the only service provider of a label. However, the multi-acquisition established in Uruguay meant a transformation of the payments market, which forced the company to face new challenges for the different businesses to continue choosing their services.

A payments company is essentially a technology company, and it tests that leadership and the trust of its clients based on the robustness of its operational platform, the quality of its service, and its professional team. For TotalNet, maintaining leadership meant creating the conditions to offer the most secure, operationally continuous, and reliable platform on the market. That is why this transformation required placing great emphasis on the solutions and developments that were adopted.

A journey of transformation and innovation

TotalNet's digital transformation began in 2016. Until then, the solutions used were practically the same as when the company was founded in 1997. At that time, a meal delivery service asked for a tool that would allow it to offer in its application the possibility of customers paying by bank card. Initially, they used their own on-premises services to deliver the solution. "We soon realized that the infrastructure supporting it was not feasible and that we couldn't respond to demand," says Juan Andrés Antoniuk, Technology Manager at TotalNet. This brought the first approach to the Microsoft cloud platform, Azure.

The next solution deployed in Azure was Elasticsearch, a distributed search and analysis system that enables complex search capabilities across various types of data to monitor the entire operation. Antoniuk states that having this system gave TotalNet "a very big leap forward in terms of quality."

Witnessing the benefits Azure provided to the enterprise and after discovering Microsoft financial services solutions, TotalNet began a true process of digitization. With the help of Microsoft partner Pyxis, it began a process of migration— renewing infrastructure and discovering new solutions relevant to its needs.

Security: the number one priority in a financial service

One of the biggest challenges TotalNet faced was integrating authentication from different applications—some legacy and others already built in the cloud—while separating organizational user access from external employee access. Through Pyxis Cloud Security Services consulting, they chose a customer identity access management security solution based on Azure Active Directory B2C, which was adopted as the central hub for the growth of the rest of their solutions and applications and to process operations through their platform.

Azure Active Directory B2C is a customer identity access management solution capable of supporting millions of users and billions of authentications per day. It also handles the scaling and security of the authentication platform, monitoring, and automatic threat control. It also offers the ability to use social, corporate, or local media account identities to access single sign-on features for apps and APIs.

In turn, TotalNet adopted Azure Application Gateway, a web traffic load balancer that allows traffic to be managed on web applications, taking advantage of a secure proxy.

"The cloud environment and solutions like Azure Active Directory give us the flexibility to continue our digital transformation process," Antoniuk says. With the adoption of these tools, TotalNet found a platform ready to support the needs of an increasingly demanding business.

The benefits of an integrated security solution

Thanks to the aforementioned technologies, TotalNet was able to separate the external customer database from the company's internal data. Plus, another benefit was that the user can manage it themselves.

Xavier Verdino, Head of the Infrastructure and DevOps Business Unit at Pyxis, mentions that Azure, particularly Azure Active Directory B2C, was a strategic ally as it accompanied the exponential challenges that TotalNet was facing. "By having the entire platform protected, the company relied on Microsoft to strengthen its security strategy, allowing it to focus on other aspects of the business."

The Future of TotalNet

The challenge continues, and digitization is increasingly part of TotalNet. "Having gone from a monopoly supplier to a competitor, and even though we always work to best serve our customers, it has made us shift our focus when dealing with merchants," Antoniuk explains. "Today, we are working with Azure Synapse to segment and deliver personalized services by leveraging data," he adds.

The company promises to deepen innovation, incorporating more options and better services for its businesses, maintaining security and collection guarantees. "We found a vehicle in technology to add value to our customers, with a focus on the strategic differentiator to continue growing," concludes TotalNet Technology Manager Juan Andrés Antoinuk.