Parlay Data | Mission

Executive Summary

Parlay Data, a managed service provider for communications and payment solutions, partnered with Mission to automate its file ingestion and distribution pipeline. Parlay needed a secure, intelligent system that could keep pace with client growth. Mission delivered an automated, AWS-native pipeline that eliminated manual intervention, introduced layered security, and positioned Parlay to take on new business.

About Parlay Data

Parlay Data is a managed service provider specializing in communications and payment solutions. The company helps businesses with complex communication and payment requirements build custom programs that ingest data in whatever format clients need, then output the communications and payments their operations demand, governed by each client’s own rules and logic.

Mission keeps our environment well maintained and very secure. There’s layered security working with Mission. We always know exactly where we’re at because of the updates that Mission provides. There’s never a question of how we’re doing or what we need to do better.

KYLE ALLEN

Vice President, Parlay Data

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Background

Carved out of a larger organization in 2020, Parlay Data has been systematically building custom, purpose-built infrastructure ever since. As it weaned itself off legacy corporate partnerships and inherited systems, the company faced the challenge of constructing new capabilities that would match, and ultimately surpass, what it had previously relied on.

Challenge

Parlay’s core business model relies on receiving data files from clients to trigger communication and payment fulfillment, a process that each client shapes differently. Varying SLAs, file formats, frequencies, and fulfillment workflows made coordination increasingly untenable as the client roster grew. The absence of a custom-built system meant staff spent meaningful time on managing legacy systems -tasks that offered no strategic value.

The risk was concrete. The ceiling on what Parlay could accomplish as a business was defined by the limitations of legacy systems and the bandwidth of its operations team to manage those systems to meet evolving client needs. Without a new system, taking on even a handful of additional complex client programs was an arduous proposition.

Why Mission

As Parlay scaled its AWS environment, it sought a partner capable of managing that environment with rigor. A focused search led to Mission, which had earned recognition as a global leader in AWS security for multiple consecutive years. That credential was the deciding factor.

Parlay evaluated vendors across a range of sizes before narrowing its choice. The tight integration Mission maintained with AWS, and the closeness with which the two organizations worked, distinguished Mission from the field. The combination of deep security expertise and genuine collaboration made the fit clear.

Why AWS

AWS has been foundational to Parlay’s infrastructure build-out since the company’s inception. Kyle Allen, who leads the technology function at Parlay, put it plainly: AWS is user-friendly enough that the team can work within it directly, whether independently or alongside partners. The breadth of native tooling means there is almost always a well-engineered path to accomplishing what the business needs, often with less effort than alternative approaches would require.

Solution

Mission designed and built an automated file ingestion and distribution pipeline anchored by AWS Transfer Family, the managed SFTP service that handles secure file movement at the edges of the system. The architecture uses Amazon DynamoDB as a centralized directory, what Allen described as “the phone book,” storing the configuration parameters for every client and fulfillment workflow: connection endpoints, port details, file naming conventions, delivery frequencies, and destination paths.

Amazon EventBridge drives the scheduling layer, triggering AWS Glue jobs at defined intervals to reach out to client SFTP endpoints, retrieve files according to each client’s configuration, and land them in a designated S3 staging zone. From there, Amazon GuardDuty performs malware scanning on every inbound file. Files that pass inspection move to a clean zone; files that fail are quarantined automatically. No manual review is required at any step.

To prevent duplicate processing, the system stores a hash of every file it handles. If the same file arrives again in a subsequent pull cycle, it is written to a duplicate log rather than reprocessed. Given that much of Parlay’s output involves physical production, the financial exposure from duplicate runs made this control especially important.

Distribution from the clean zone follows the same configuration-driven logic. When a file is ready to send, the system reads the fulfillment workflow parameters from DynamoDB and pushes the file outbound through Transfer Family. Delivery attempts are logged in a transaction record, and a retry mechanism backed by AWS Lambda and SQS handles any endpoint failures. A dead letter queue catches undeliverable files and recycles them once the fulfillment workflow endpoint comes back online. Credentials across the entire pipeline are managed securely through AWS Secrets Manager. The result is a self-managing system with end-to-end observability and no single point of failure.

Results

The pipeline has operated with a 0% transfer failure rate since deployment. Every file that has entered the system has reached its destination.

The more significant shift, though, is in what Parlay can now pursue. Before, the team worried it would reach a hard ceiling. Taking on additional complex client programs would have required hiring more staff or fundamentally changing how work got done. The new system removed that constraint. Onboarding a new client, once a time-consuming configuration exercise, now comes down to populating records in DynamoDB. The pipeline reads those parameters and begins operating immediately.

That scalability is already showing up in the pipeline. Parlay is currently in active discussions to open three new programs with one of its largest enterprise clients, work that would have been a challenge to take on with the previous system. Each program within that client relationship functions as an independent business engagement, making the expansion equivalent to landing three new clients from a single existing relationship.

Beyond the project itself, Mission’s ongoing managed services continue to support Parlay’s environment. Recent work has included compliance audit preparation, configuration hardening, and access management for users requiring restricted environment access. Allen described the broader relationship simply: “Mission’s just been a really great partner to have, to keep our environment safe, secure, provide recommendations, and provide assistance. A great working relationship for us.”

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