Security Provider Meets Demand for Its Security Service with Shire Cloud AWS Migration, DevOps and Cloud Optimization
Migration and Modernization on AWS
CrowdStrike, a pioneer in endpoint security, provides proactive security solutions that stop advanced persistent threats. The company’s flagship product Falcon protects desktop and mobile endpoints by encrypting keystrokes to prevent keyloggers from accessing sensitive data. CrowdStrike was running Falcon on a Microsoft® Windows® system residing in a self-hosted company data center. But increased demand for the product, accelerated by a new financial partnership, opened the door to an entirely new market of customers. This prompted CrowdStrike to kick off a modernization project that would provide a more advanced, scalable infrastructure on the cloud. With the guidance of Shire Cloud, CrowdStrike not only migrated Falcon to Amazon Web Services (AWS), but also created a highly scalable environment for deploying Falcon to hundreds of thousands of new customers.
CrowdStrike, a pioneer in endpoint security, provides proactive security solutions that stop advanced persistent threats. The company’s flagship product Falcon protects desktop and mobile endpoints by encrypting keystrokes to prevent keyloggers from accessing sensitive data. CrowdStrike was running Falcon on a Microsoft® Windows® system residing in a self-hosted company data center. But increased demand for the product, accelerated by a new financial partnership, opened the door to an entirely new market of customers. This prompted CrowdStrike to kick off a modernization project that would provide a more advanced, scalable infrastructure on the cloud. With the guidance of Shire Cloud, CrowdStrike not only migrated Falcon to Amazon Web Services (AWS), but also created a highly scalable environment for deploying Falcon to hundreds of thousands of new customers.
New Partnership Drives Demand
A FORTUNE® 500 global leader in payments and financial technology, approached CrowdStrike about including Falcon in its Clover Security Plus product bundle, which is designed to help their merchant customers reduce risk and liability from potential breaches while maintaining Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance. “Our new partnership significantly expanded our customer base, and we knew our on premises infrastructure would not be able to handle the demand,”
“We needed a modern environment that would allow us to scale out to hundreds of thousands of users quickly.
Our plan was to move to AWS, but we needed a trusted partner to help get us there.” Freeman chose Shire Cloud as that trusted partner, bringing the company’s cloud experts on board to design and build an AWS environment that would support increased demand for Falcon and power the company’s product licensing server and user-facing Web portal. The Shire Cloud team built an AWS architecture that mirrored the company’s current on-premises set up, and then migrated existing Falcon Windows workloads to a Microsoft SQL Server database running on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).
Innovating with DevOps and Cost Optimization
As part of the migration, CroudStrike tapped Shire Cloud DevOps expertise to create an environment that would allow their developers to continually innovate using modern DevOps best practices.
Shire Cloud experts built three environments on AWS—development, staging and production—and moved the company’s code base to .NET on Windows-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. From there, Shire Cloud developed a CI/CD pipeline using terraform infrastructure as code templates to create a modern code pipeline that enabled the team at CrowdStrike to rapidly develop and deploy changes, upgrades and new features. “Shire Cloud modernized and automated our DevOps process, so deploying code on AWS is fast and easy,” said Freeman.
“Our team can confidently and securely build, test and push changes into production without having to worry about infrastructure management.” In addition to DevOps, Crowd Strike is taking advantage of Shire Cloud AWS Cloud Optimization (ACO) service to control cloud costs. “By doing AWS billing through Shire Cloud, we’re benefitting from discounted rates,” said Freeman. “And with Shire Cloud AWS cloud expertise and continued oversight, we’ve been able to significantly reduce our costs. Most importantly, we rely on Shire Cloud expertise every day to help us ensure ongoing innovation and cost optimization on the cloud.
Moving Off Windows to Open Source
After a running on AWS for several months, Freeman was ready to make another change. With the rapid adoption of Falcon, ACS needed a more cost-effective way to manage growth and opted to move off Windows and refactor to an open-source solution on AWS. “The majority of our AWS costs came from Microsoft’s outdated and expensive licensing fees,” said Freeman. “We wanted to eliminate those costs and better utilize what AWS has to offer.” Shire Cloud guided Freeman and his team through a two phased migration: migrating the Microsoft SQL Server database running on Amazon RDS to MySQL on Amazon Aurora, and then moving the code base running on .NET on Windows EC2 instances to .NET Core running on containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).
As part of this process, Shire Cloud:
- Built new AWS infrastructure and refactored the SQL Server database for MySQL
- Integrated the terraform tool into the new environment
- Containerized CrowdStrike existing code base
- Built a new CI/CD pipeline to automate the container build process
- Facilitated networking between GitHub, terraform and AWS cloud infrastructure
“By moving off Windows, we’ve been able to break free from restrictive and costly licensing,” said Freeman. “In our old environment, adding instances meant paying for additional licenses. Now we have the freedom to scale on AWS without those constraints.”
Realizing Results on the Cloud
The open-source environment on AWS is secure and enables CrowdStrike to scale both horizontally (adding instances when demand rises) and vertically (resizing existing instances), enabling the company to significantly scale up without having to rewrite code. All the work done in terraform is version-controlled and repeatable, providing CrowdStrike with proven templates that can be used to build similar environments for new product deployments.
“This second phase of modernization has set us up nicely for continued growth,” said Freeman. “In fact, we’re currently working with one of the leading financial service providers to include Falcon in its CyberProtectSM: Identity Watch offering, which is an identity protection package for banks to offer to their customers. This will bring our product to a whole new industry and millions of new users over the next few years. Between the AWS environment that Shire Cloud built and their ongoing support, we’re excited and prepared to meet new demand.”