ZoneFox, a Fortinet company, is a world-class security platform that effectively combats the growing
issue of insider threats by reducing the risk of data theft, leakage and misuse in organisations across the globe.
Through sophisticated UEBA and machine learning technology, ZoneFox provides rapid, actionable insights around user behaviour and data flow. This insight comes from both on and off the corporate network, without impacting endpoints and user privacy. Significantly strengthening security posture, ZoneFox enables organisations to see where business-critical data is going, who is accessing it and, most importantly, who is doing things with it that they shouldn’t be – either accidentally or maliciously.
Challenge: maintaining resilience at scale
Cloud resiliency is pivotal to ZoneFox – its platform is built on the premise of data security. Since launching the hosted ZoneFox solution, the number of instances has grown to over 100 EC2 (more than 700 snapshots), comprising of a mix of development and production environments across multiple regions globally.
“It’s important for us that the hosted ZoneFox platform is resilient, scalable and secure, and a key component of that is being able to recover quickly from an incident that could result in data loss for our customer.”
—Jamie MacDonald, Head of Platform and Security at ZoneFox
Jamie led the team at ZoneFox to evaluate the market and source a partner that could deliver a backup solution that would deliver the highest possible levels of resiliency, whilst not impact the internal team’s productivity.
“We run live customer environments in the cloud, so it is important to us that we have a robust backup and DR strategy in place. The growth of the business and development of our award-winning technology are our core focuses and we appreciate that working with best in class partners enables us to do this more efficiently and effectively.”
For a company that is built upon bolstering data visibility and security, promising anything less than 100% uptime for its customers would have been unacceptable. This is why ZoneFox sought a scalable solution that offers availability, automation, powerful DR capabilities and ease of implementation.
Solution: highly resilient AWS environment
ZoneFox first turned to N2W to help manage its growing AWS environment and support its hosted offering. And with N2W ZoneFox has been able to do just that.
“The main reason we chose N2W was to ensure the resiliency of our Hosted ZoneFox environment and safeguard customer data. Regular backups and cross-region DR support, combined with a product that works around the clock, ensures we can have confidence in the resiliency of our platform.”
ZoneFox credits N2W’s intuitive interface, fast deployment and smooth buying process with helping to quickly enhance the robustness of its own solution. Jamie lists several benefits realized from using N2W:
- Automation of the backup lifecycling management process
- Improved resiliency and disaster recovery —with recovery time reduced from one hour to ONE click
- Ease of deployment and use —fast onboarding takes only 15 minutes to set up
- Ability to quickly clone and re-deploy instances for testing purposes
“Our operations engineers know that N2W is continuously running to ensure that our infrastructure is protected. This means that they have more time to work on other tasks, instead of manually performing or checking backup processes.”
The company not only uses N2WS to manage daily backup operations – it has leveraged the solution to spin up environments in other regions and proactively run disaster recovery drills to test near-zero downtime for its clients in the event of an incident. The ZoneFox team also regularly use N2W to restore instances back to a known state during development testing.
“It’s a really useful devOps tool – we can take a snapshot of an instance, make some changes which might break stuff and then revert it back to exactly how it was before we made changes. We also appreciate having this capability to use for production machines if we need to,” Jamie remarks. This entire process takes just under ten minutes.
By implementing N2W, ZoneFox has been able to gain peace of mind knowing that their AWS environment is secure and recoverable, thus enabling the team to focus on growing the business and developing the award-winning enhanced cybersecurity solution.
