Accelerating Ping Deployment with Midships Accelerator
- Juan Redondo
- Jan 5
- 3 min read
How One of the UK’s Largest Banks Fast-Tracked Their Ping Identity Deployment with the Midships Accelerator
One of the UK’s largest banks—ranked among the top 25 globally with over 30 million customers—set out to deploy the Ping Identity platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The bank required a production-grade deployment capable of meeting stringent enterprise standards across security, scalability, operational control, and multi-region resilience.
Key requirements included:
Native integration with HashiCorp Vault
Compatibility with existing CI/CD and security tooling
Support for multi-region and multi-cloud architectures
Scalable directory services aligned with high-throughput workloads
Early Deployment Challenges
The bank initially pursued deployment using Ping Identity’s ForgeOps framework. While ForgeOps provides a comprehensive reference implementation, the bank encountered challenges adapting it to their internal standards and operating model.
Areas requiring significant customization included:
Build and Image Management
The layered image build approach required substantial refactoring to align with internal CI/CD pipelines, security controls, and image governance policies.
Secrets and Certificate Management
The bank’s production environments mandate Vault-based secret injection. Integrating this cleanly required customizing several default components.
Geographic Resilience
Achieving active-active, multi-region deployments required additional architectural work beyond the baseline framework.
Directory Service Scaling
Supporting the bank’s throughput and replication requirements necessitated a directory architecture beyond the default assumptions.
Despite close collaboration and internal effort, progress remained incremental, prompting the bank to evaluate alternative deployment approaches.
The Turning Point: Trusting the Midships Accelerator
Midships recommended transitioning to the Midships Ping AIS Accelerator, a cloud-native deployment toolkit designed specifically for enterprise-scale IAM platforms.
The accelerator provided a deployment model aligned from day one with the bank’s requirements, reducing the need for rework or workaround-based engineering
Within less than one week, the bank had a production-grade Ping Identity stack fully deployed—including Access Manager, Directory Server, and CI/CD pipelines.
Why the Midships Ping AIS Accelerator Was a Game Changer
✅ Native Vault Integration
No need for custom sidecars or workarounds. The Ping AIS accelerator provides out-of-the-box integration with HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secrets Manager, and CyberArk Conjur—supporting volume mounts, Kubernetes secrets, and REST-based injection.
✅ Flexible Image Build Architecture
Modular, transparent image templates integrate cleanly with internal build pipelines, security scanning, and governance models.
✅ Built-in Multi-Region and Multi-Cloud Support
Includes cloud-agnostic templates and replication strategies to support distributed identity infrastructure from day one.
✅ Scalable Directory Services
Supports both self-replicating and externally replicated directory topologies, enabling high-throughput, enterprise-scale directory deployments.
Results: A 3-Day Full Deployment, End-to-End
Using the Midships Ping AIS Accelerator, the bank established a fully operational, production-ready Ping Identity deployment within 3 days. The core Ping platform was delivered end-to-end, including CI/CD automation and native Vault integration.
Delivered components included:
Ping Access Manager
Ping Directory Server
Automated CI/CD pipelines
Native Vault integration
Multi-region deployment templates
The solution met the bank’s security, scalability, and operational requirements while significantly accelerating time to production.
Used by Leading Banks Across Southeast Asia
The Midships Ping AIS Accelerator is now used by several of the largest banks across Southeast Asia, helping them move faster while staying compliant with strict enterprise controls.
Writer’s Overview
Juan Redondo – Co-Founder & Head of Identity, Midships
Juan is a certified IAM specialist with 12+ years of experience architecting CIAM platforms for global banks and retailers. He leads the Identity practice at Midships, blending deep product knowledge with hands-on delivery in complex environments.
Short bio: Juan brings technical excellence in Ping, ForgeRock, and Kubernetes, delivering scalable, secure identity solutions from concept to production.