Three AWS-centric Projects Help Clearswift Maintain Email Security Leadership
Challenge
Clearswift needed support across several areas to maintain its position as a market leader in phishing defense solutions.
Solution
Bringdev helped Clearswift through staff augmentation, the development of a monitoring solution, and a data migration.
Benefits
Clearswift now has the capabilities it needs to track hundreds of hosted sensors and store data securely with minimal effort.
AWS Services
AWS Elasticsearch Service, AWS ElasticCache for Redis, Amazon EKS, Amazon Aurora, AWS RDS
Executive Summary
Clearswift is the Trusted Email Identity Company™, protecting brands and people from devastating phishing and socially-engineered attacks. Over several months, Bringdev partnered with Clearswift on three diverse projects — all requiring extensive AWS expertise in several areas ranging from staff augmentation to database migration.
The collaboration enabled Clearswift to maintain its aggressive pace of product and service releases and updates — which is critical for maintaining its position as the email security category leader.
Project 1: Staff Augmentation
Clearswift is the Trusted Email Identity Company™, protecting brands and people from devastating phishing and socially-engineered attacks. Over several months, Bringdev partnered with Clearswift on three diverse projects — all requiring extensive AWS expertise in several areas ranging from staff augmentation to database migration.
The collaboration enabled Clearswift to maintain its aggressive pace of product and service releases and updates — which is critical for maintaining its position as the email security category leader.
Project 2: Sensor Monitoring
Pleased with Bringdev's deep expertise and on-time delivery, Clearswift next tasked the company with developing a monitoring solution to gather health information for its secure email gateway hosted sensors that help intercept malicious messages and block or redirect them to quarantine for further incident investigation. The project also required a monitoring dashboard to improve metrics visibility and filtering.
The Bringdev team designed, tested and deployed a solution that uses Prometheus, an open source monitoring system for metrics aggregation, and Grafana Lab’s Grafana, an open source platform for visualizing metrics.
A highly available configuration of Prometheus was installed in a cluster with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Prometheus’ AlertManager communicates alerts to PagerDuty, an incident management platform. Persistent storage — the storage volumes that remain available beyond the life of individual containers — was used for historic data from Prometheus. Amazon Aurora was integrated with Grafana to build the dashboards for both every day and special use.
In addition, the Bringdev team delivered automation tools to setup and monitor the solution, along with documentation. Now, all newly created sensors can be set up with monitoring and registered in the monitoring system.
After implementing the new monitoring solution, Clearswift has been able to grow its network of sensors worry-free and at a much lower cost compared to other solutions.
Project 3: Database Migration
Clearswift then entrusted Bringdev with yet another project: this one requiring a proof of concept (POC) for migrating two self-hosted databases (on AWS EC2 instances) to AWS RDS/ PostgreSQL and Aurora.
The project presented a number of challenges. One of the databases was PostgreSQL 9.3 and the other was Citus 6.0 on PostgreSQL 9.5. Neither PostgreSQL version is still being supported.
Citus had primarily been used for distributed queries and batch loading. With a new version released, the transition would be much more cumbersome. In addition, no more than one hour of downtime was acceptable for the migration process. Performance had to be maintained at the same level.
Bringdev's solution entailed using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with one master and two slaves using c5.xlarge instances for the Postgres 9.3 database. Two three-node Aurora clusters were configured to host the Citus data.
Data migration was performed using Bucardo, an asynchronous, multi-master, master-slave table-based replication system.
Bringdev reviewed the current data schema and architecture, created a transition plan, defined migration tools, conducted a POC of the migration, and assisted with query performance tests.
Following the POC, Clearswift was able to plan the migration of its production databases to a managed AWS offering. The result: reduced environment complexity and less administrative burden required to manage the self-hosted databases.
General Results
Bringdev supplied the resources and expertise Clearswift required, freeing up its internal staff and enabling the implementation of three successful projects.
All project requirements were met and Clearswift's expectations were exceeded, thanks to Bringdev's focus on collaboration and open communication, its AWS expertise, and the on-time delivery of its well-thought-out solutions.
Specifically for the sensor monitoring project, the custom-built monitoring system provides a versatile means of tracking the health and performance of hundreds of hosted sensors. This eliminates costly licensing and adds flexibility.
For the database migration project, with databases migrated to Amazon-managed offerings like Aurora and RDS for PostgreSQL, Clearswift is able to keep its infrastructure secure and up to date with minimal effort. At the same time, it’s able to maintain high performance and availability of core data storage.
Perhaps most importantly, Clearswift gained a value-added and trusted partner that it can count on for future projects.