Maintaining Payroll Security Across Geographies

A leading North American payroll services provider offering end-to-end digital solutions for small to large enterprises. Their cloud-based platform supports payroll processing, tax filing, employee benefits management, and regulatory compliance for thousands of businesses across diverse industries. The system integrates with HRMS, finance tools, and third-party tax platforms.

As the client scaled its payroll platform to support multi-country compliance and real-time payroll cycles, several security concerns arose across web applications, APIs, and Azure-hosted infrastructure:

• Modules handling salary disbursement, tax calculations, and employee benefits lacked granular access control and secure session management
• APIs responsible for third-party tax integrations and employee onboarding exposed sensitive data through insufficient validation
• Azure cloud environment presented risks due to broad IAM roles, misconfigured storage access, and missing encryption policies
• Vulnerabilities were often discovered late, affecting payroll timelines and SLA commitments with customers

Evoke deployed an Azure Cloud Security, Product Security, and Application Security strategy to secure the client’s high-stakes payroll infrastructure:

• Conducted web and API security testing on critical workflows
• Performed Azure infrastructure assessments
• Enabled risk-based prioritization
• Deployed a Security Console Dashboard

• Increased vulnerability detection by 45% pre-release, ensuring zero critical issues in live payroll runs
• Reduced turnaround time for fixes by 60%, enabling timely and uninterrupted payroll processing
• Improved cross-functional collaboration between compliance, product, and engineering teams
• Established a secure-by-design model for all future feature rollouts and tax compliance updates
• Strengthened audit posture across clients with proof of remediation and structured evidence trails