IBM Cloud meets Censornet’s stringent requirements with a flexible, affordable solution.
Since 2007, Censornet has helped organizations of all sizes, all over the world, stay ahead of the bad guys with e-mail security, web security, multi-factor authentication, and more. Our Unified Security Service enables our clients’ IT departments to better control internet access, regardless of users’ locations, while providing senior management with increased visibility into threats and threat mitigation activities.
In the early years, we operated in an on-premises environment, but over time, we have shifted steadily toward a purely cloud-based environment. At the beginning of that transition, we spent a lot of time making sure the cloud provider we selected could meet our stringent requirements. IBM was the only organization that ticked all of the boxes for us.
The best of both worlds
The first thing that differentiated IBM Cloud was the fact that it offered us on-demand access to both physical and virtual machines. Many platforms offer virtual servers on demand, but IBM was the only one that could do both.
Much of what we do involves very large amounts of data that must be processed in near real-time. Our solution intercepts end-user requests, compares them to the client organization’s policies and then returns a final action, either allowing or blocking the request. Latency around this process is critical. Our IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers achieve an average latency of 35 milliseconds, which is extraordinary. They also scale up and down automatically, helping ensure that we can meet increased traffic levels with ease.
Bare metal servers deliver unmatched speed and power, but they can be expensive—especially when performing business processes that have less-strict requirements around latency. For those, we use IBM Cloud Virtual Servers, which offer the advantages of being scalable, flexible, and easy to administrate.
Flexible storage options and an attractive geographic footprint
IBM Cloud Block Storage also appealed to us as a flexible, durable storage option with very high throughput and redundant network storage for up to 12 terabytes. With Endurance tiers, we pay a pre-defined, per-gigabyte price, which helps keep costs under control.
Among other important considerations were the number and location of IBM’s data centers throughout the UK and Europe, but also worldwide. These data centers are interconnected, which means we don’t have to pay to transfer data between servers—particularly vital for us because we collect a massive amount of log data from our customers and then move it back to the data center or service region of their choice.
A strategic alliance
When we decided to work with IBM, we wanted to build a long-term relationship with a company that would help us adopt new technologies as they became available. IBM has proven itself to be just that kind of company.
Our experience with IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services is a great example. Right now, we’re using Kubernetes to build a cloud identity and access management service—or SaaS for IAM solution—on the platform. Once that project is complete, we plan to continue developing other forward-thinking projects with IBM at our side.