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The NE Association, a non-profit based in New England, was facing a significant challenge with their email security. They were using Sophos, but the solution was causing more problems than it was solving. The organization was receiving a high volume of phishing and malware attacks, and Sophos was not effectively blocking these threats. Additionally, the Sophos solution was causing confusion among staff due to its inconsistent encryption policy. The NE Association needed a new solution that was user-friendly, connected via API, and cost-effective.

The company was moving a host of its on-premise processes to AWS and Azure to keep up with massive computing demands and gain a competitive edge. Automation and compliance across the hybrid environment were key requirements as the company struggled with multiple manual security tools for monitoring and compliance. The overall environment is dynamic, with a network of thousands of workloads, and the ability to obtain and maintain compliance across this diverse environment is critical.

Cepheid, a molecular diagnostics company, was seeking a multi-layer security solution, with a focus on 'OS hardening' or 'OS security'. They wanted to secure the OS itself, separate from and complementary to traditional vulnerability scanning. They also wanted a solution that could quickly bring a server back to a known security baseline if a potential risk was identified. The speed of remediation was to be based on the risk and the asset type, as well as industry recommendations.

Apple Federal Credit Union (Apple FCU) is a large financial institution with over 20 branches across Northern Virginia and access to more than 53,000 ATMs nationwide. They are subject to Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and National Credit Union Association (NCUA) regulations, which require them to assess and remediate potential security vulnerabilities quickly. Additionally, they are subject to annual audits by the NCUA, in which they must document and prove compliance with internal security policies and show ongoing assessments of internal and external security vulnerabilities. The challenge for Apple FCU was to provide more visibility into the security of their on-premise production environment and to streamline the audit process.

The article discusses the challenges faced by organizations in the face of increasing cyber threats. These include the difficulty in assessing and documenting cyber risk, the rapid pace of technology which increases dependency on third parties, and the inability of IT to trace or control data exfiltration. The role of government and information custody is often misunderstood, and findings in audit reports can become barriers to business. In today’s cloud economy, customer due diligence has become a mandate. The article also highlights the importance of complying with the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls (CIS CSC v6.0), which are updated by cyber experts based on actual attack data from various public and private threat sources.

Gainsight, a leading Customer Success Company, was facing a couple of challenges. Firstly, they needed network visibility of all assets running in their Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud account. Without this visibility, they were operating at a disadvantage, unable to manage and remediate risks effectively. Secondly, they needed to identify how the company measured up to compliance frameworks and industry guidelines. The team needed a solution that could automate their audit compliance without having to worry about manually keeping up with the constantly changing compliance regulations.

Pacific Dental Service (PDS) is a leading dental support organization that provides supported autonomy to over 630 dental practices. The company's Private Practice+® model enables dentists to focus on clinical excellence and the highest levels of cost-effective comprehensive patient care. As a support services provider in the healthcare space, PDS is subject to HIPAA and other regulations. PDS’ IT team has upwards of 3,500 servers and 13,500 endpoints under their control, spanning traditional data centers, AWS, and including national and regional support centers and dental offices. Over time, the company expects to migrate additional applications to AWS. With a network of supported dental practices, the overall environment is very dynamic and the ability to maintain compliance across this diverse environment is critical. Beyond HIPAA, the ability to map the NIST CSF into HITRUST is central to PDS’ hybrid cloud security posture.

The company, a large global data center and colocation provider, was facing challenges with compliance, visibility, and OS hardening across its diverse hybrid environment. The IT team manages upwards of 15,000 servers and 13,500 endpoints spanning traditional data centers, Azure, and AWS environments. The company was concerned about the lack of visibility into cloud endpoints and feared an inaccurate view presented by disjointed security tools across its hybrid infrastructure attack surface. The company also needed to map and automate ISO and NIST CSF frameworks to each asset, supporting its FEDRAMP-approved system.

The company, a national, diversified, non-profit healthcare partner, was looking to automate processes to lower infrastructure and manual labor costs. It decided to move some operations to the cloud (Azure), while still sustaining an on-premise base. However, maintaining visibility and automating compliance within this hybrid infrastructure was a major concern for the security/IT teams. The company required visibility across both its Windows and Linux assets with the ability to automate DISA STIGS, SOC2, and HIPAA compliance assessments for its cloud and on-premise. After looking at “cloud security” solutions, they found that they failed to integrate into the organization’s business-critical applications, meet required compliance regulations, and address network complexities.

The organization, a financial data aggregation and analytics provider, was in need of a robust cybersecurity solution to protect its hybrid environment, which includes AWS, Docker, and on-premise implementations. Being part of the fintech ecosystem, the company is bound to the same high security standards as its clients, which include top financial institutions in the United States. The company wanted to ensure that its environment was continually protected, with not only visibility but also remediation guidelines to adhere to its strict company safeguards. Maintaining its 'golden posture' amongst its various operating systems leveraging packaged and custom scripts with one central view was key to this company choosing Cavirin.

Bally, a Swiss luxury leather goods brand, was among the first high-end brands to realize the potential of the increasingly affluent Chinese market. Since launching the first shop in Hong Kong in 1978 and Beijing in 1986, Bally has expanded its presence in the country to 60, with 51 boutiques in mainland China and 9 in Hong Kong. To further capitalize on the business opportunities in the country, Bally introduced a dedicated Chinese website, www.bally.cn, in 2011. The website, featuring high-resolution images and videos of Bally’s high-end shoes, handbags, and accessories, brings the company’s trademark products to the fingertips of China’s growing population of high-income earners. Despite the opportunities offered by the Chinese market, e-commerce in the country poses a few challenges too. Due to the 'Great Firewall' implemented by the Chinese government, companies such as Bally need to be aware of its restrictions and localize their content, not only regarding language but also photography and site layout. Chinese geography can also prove problematic. Despite a high level of Internet penetration in the biggest cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, there are areas where telecommunications infrastructure is in need of an upgrade to meet the demands of the growing digital economy. China’s Internet infrastructure has limited peering points and fragmented network topology, which can result in patchy connectivity and slow page download speeds for web users.

HighQ, a leading provider of secure document exchange and social collaboration software, faced a challenge when its customers, including a major international law firm, began to roll out HighQ’s collaboration platform to their overseas offices. Users outside of Europe were experiencing high latency when accessing the application, leading to a slowdown in web page loading and document transfer speeds, especially during peak business hours. HighQ considered hosting in multiple local data centres to achieve optimal performance for users in the US and Australia. However, the time and resource required to establish similar data centre infrastructure overseas made this strategy unrealistic.

Golfweek.com, a website providing in-depth coverage of the professional golf world, was not maximizing its video advertising revenue due to the lack of insight into video viewership from its content delivery network (CDN) provider. The CDN provider’s back-end analytics system was weak, and Golfweek.com needed to either build its own video reporting engine and integrate it with the CDN provider’s technology or find an alternative service provider that could handle its long tail of video content. With a limited application development staff, it decided to seek another CDN provider. In addition to robust and integrated reporting, Golfweek.com also sought must-have capabilities in the areas of website uptime, customer service, and global reach. It also sought better customer support and highly flexible service terms.

The Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, the Republic of Indonesia, has been running its origin servers in Indonesia and the United States. However, when overseas users, the main target of the website, tried to access the website, web page loading speeds were too slow. There were two urgent challenges that the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy, the Republic of Indonesia, wished to resolve and improve. First, page loading speeds. It required faster page loading speeds in order to allow users to search for the information they want. Second, the Ministry wanted more efficient operation and management of its IT infrastructure to respond to an increase in access from overseas users scattered all over the world.

Historic Futures (HF) offers a unique Internet-based traceability service known as String, which is used by hundreds of businesses, including Gap, Levi’s, Tesco, and Wal-Mart. However, poor Internet performance in critical supply-base countries and regions, such as Bangladesh, China, India, and Southeast Asia, made the String application load at painfully slow speeds. This led suppliers in some areas to complain that the performance of String made the application unusable. As a result, HF’s customers struggled to collect data needed for traceability purposes. HF needed to improve global performance of its application or risk losing customers. HF’s IT team considered how it could serve the application locally in problematic regions. It evaluated some of the largest global hosting providers but found that each one lacked data centre presence in one or more core regions of the world. HF also concluded that building out its own global data centres would put too much strain on its limited IT resources and budget.

Infernum Productions AG, an international online games publisher and developer, faced a challenge with their fantasy MMORPG “Dragon’s Prophet”. The game required users to download and install an approximately 10 GB data packet prior to playing. Even with relatively fast data connections, download times often reached up to 4 hours. This long waiting period tested the patience of many users, often resulting in the interruption of the download and negative comments in the Gamer forums. The transfer speed and conversion rate (the ratio between downloads and actual game registrations) required significant optimisation to expand the gaming community, especially in the key geographical regions of Germany, France, Great Britain and Poland.

In April 2012, Innisfree entered the Chinese market to capitalise on the growth potential by winning over prospective buyers. Before opening its first store in Shanghai and while planning for the launch of their Chinese website, Innisfree examined how it could best provide a seamless online shopping experience for customers. The objective of the Chinese website was to deliver the same customer experience as the Korean website. To achieve this, the brand had the following requirements: First, fast loading was essential because a slow loading time could result in a rapid increase in the bounce rate for visitors. Second, the brand needed a system environment capable of flexibly responding to high user traffic, for example, during a promotion on the website. The third requirement was for full technical support and website maintenance to be provided. It was essential that full technical support be made readily available for any request once the service was adopted.

Bally Interactive, a division of Bally Technologies, began serving online casinos with downloadable games but faced major cost and user experience challenges. Serving both dynamic and static content from a single data center location in Gibraltar, bandwidth pricing and performance challenges increased as player counts grew. With players originating from Europe, nearly every game-play request came from an international location. The company had to overcome performance and pricing issues immediately. Gibraltar’s extremely expensive bandwidth and the inconsistent application and download performance from the local data center meant they had to act fast or lose their fast-growing audience. Complicating matters further, many of Bally Interactive’s gamers request downloads from local Internet connections, which vary greatly in performance throughout Europe.

iOffer, an online marketplace, was facing challenges in delivering dynamic applications and content to international locations due to inherent packet loss and latency of the internet. This resulted in slow download times and page load times in excess of three seconds, especially for international users who accounted for more than fifty percent of the site’s visitors each month. The company wanted to improve the delivery of dynamic applications and content to international locations and stand behind its sub-one second performance goal without affecting the bottom line or forcing iOffer to raise its prices. The company considered building an additional data center closer to international site visitors to enhance dynamic website performance, but it was deemed prohibitively expensive.

IPM Group, a Belgian media company, faced challenges with their high-traffic websites. The company's websites needed to be visually appealing, easy to navigate, fast, and reliable. They also had to handle unexpected traffic spikes, such as after significant news events. The company's existing IT infrastructure was designed for static, text-based content, which resulted in slow page load times and occasional unavailability. The company needed a solution that could improve page load times and manage traffic spikes without incurring prohibitive costs.

JCB, a pioneer in the credit card business in Japan, was facing challenges with internet latency and low availability that impacted their web content delivery to China. The sudden termination of their China web server infrastructure by the local ISP was a painful learning experience for them. They considered a policy change swiftly. There was a risk that a similar situation would occur if they worked with another similar ISP in China. As such, they decided to set up their web server in Japan to serve the China market while still having the web speed and stability of content delivery as a key area of consideration.

MYmovies.it, the second most visited video entertainment website in Italy, was looking to become a major Internet reference portal. This required the use of state-of-the-art technology to deliver a high volume of relevant content in a technologically advanced manner. The company was constantly experimenting with and implementing new solutions, tools, and products to improve and expand its premium quality services. However, the company faced the challenge of improving website performance without increasing investments in bandwidth or making changes to its existing infrastructure. MYmovies.it was looking for a single provider of caching and streaming services that could rapidly implement a higher-performance and easier-to-use solution than it had been used to. It also sought a partner that was passionately focused on the end user experience.

NHN Corporation operates two of the web’s most popular properties in Korea: Naver and Hangame. The two sites together average 950 million page views and 17 million visitors per day. However, NHN’s analysis of website visitor behavior showed that many of its China-based visitors were prematurely abandoning the Naver and Hangame sites. This puzzled NHN management, because NHN was serving the same high-quality content to China’s market as it did to the rest of the world. After more thorough analysis, NHN’s IT team noticed that slow page-load times within China were causing visitors there to spend less time and view fewer pages on the site. NHN’s Director of the CDN Management Team, Sewon Jang, summarized the problem this way: “The quality of content itself is important, but without fast page downloads, site visitors won’t stick around long enough to see all of our great content.” \n\nWith the 2008 Beijing Olympics right around the corner, NHN wanted to act fast to rectify its website performance issues. This would enable NHN to maintain a firm grasp on its web portal leadership position among China’s Korean-language audience. The company knew that there would be an enormous upswing in Korean-language search engine traffic, and it did not want search engine competitors to steal away market share in China with better site performance. According to Jang, “We needed to be faster than any other Korean portals to be the predominant player in China.”

Oxybul, a leading online toy retailer in France, initially had two different content delivery networks (CDNs): one for static content and one for dynamic content. However, the company decided to streamline its system and sought a single solution that could handle all types of content. The challenge was to find a solution that could cut Oxybul’s CDN costs, improve its website response time throughout France, and simplify its IT infrastructure by reducing the number of direct connections on the servers. Additionally, the solution needed to be able to absorb peaks in traffic, particularly during the busy Christmas holiday season.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) has a mission to provide independent information to countries with an information deficit. With this at the forefront of every business decision, Radio Netherlands Worldwide aims to ensure that people have access to information, news and background via shortwave transmission through its 3000 worldwide media partners, such as FM radio stations, regional and local websites and its own Internet website, wherever they are in the world. Over the past couple of years, the number of hours aired by short wave has decreased substantially and this trend will continue in 2012 and beyond. The broadcasters’ distribution mix is therefore shifting towards Internet distribution and in line with its core mission; it was looking to implement a reliable, fast, powerful and high-performing Internet news service to reach these challenging markets and emerging countries. One of their core aims is to provide independent information to countries with an information deficit. However, their existing Internet solution just did not have the speed or capacity to reach their principal target audiences – Asia, South America and Africa.

Transhotel, a global travel services provider, was facing challenges with its expanding client base and the increasing reliance on the internet for conducting business. The company needed a reliable and responsive technology platform that would allow close collaboration between the company and its clients. The company was also looking to expand into new markets, including Asia, Russia, Latin America, and India. The challenge was to ensure that the business could maintain and build on its growth without being hampered by speed or latency problems. The company's main website, www.transhotel.com, has a daily turnover of over 50,000 operations, most of which are room availability enquiries. 90% of these operations are served on the end-user’s computer in less than 5 seconds. The company needed a solution that would ensure speedy and uninterrupted access to the applications and websites, thus improving the end user’s experience.

Tourism Victoria, the Victorian Government’s lead tourism agency, was looking to expand its reach into strategic growth markets, particularly China and the millions of Chinese speakers around the world. They planned a two-phase, multi-million dollar online and off-line promotional campaign in China. However, they recognized that site performance and availability issues could arise within mainland China due to the country's variable Internet infrastructure and network peering. Additionally, the cost to host visitmelbourne.com in multiple datacentres in each target market would have been prohibitively expensive. Moreover, Australia’s geographic isolation from the rest of the world can add 100-200 milliseconds of latency between origin servers in Australia and international visitors.

Saxo Bank, a leading international investment bank, was facing a challenge with its online trading and investment platform, SaxoTrader, in China. The demand from investors and institutions within China to access the SaxoTrader platform grew significantly, and so did the need for accelerating the performance of the application in China. The latency caused by the distance between the Denmark-based datacentre and China, along with China’s vast geography and complex Internet peering, resulted in slower performance. Fast transaction times are critical to stock, bond, and foreign exchange trading. As little as one second can result in lost revenue from incomplete or incorrect trades based on out-of-date market information. Saxo Bank also wanted to ensure the same customer experience in China that the SaxoTrader platform is known for around the world. Saxo Bank quickly realised that doing business in China needed a different approach.

As Shopify’s customer base of online merchants grew across the globe, the company recognised the need to ensure the best website user experience possible for shoppers in a multitude of different countries. This led Shopify to underpin its website content delivery capabilities with the service of a content delivery network (CDN). Unfortunately, the CDN service provider lacked a cloud delivery presence in Australia, a fast-growing market for Shopify. To accommodate the needs of Australia-based merchants and their end users located in Australia and New Zealand, Shopify searched for a way to ensure optimal website performance in both countries - without incurring massive infrastructure build-out costs; the cost to expand data centre capabilities in the region was prohibitively expensive. At the same time, website traffic was growing for Shopify in the US and Europe. To continue its differentiated capability of delivering high-performing websites, Shopify network engineers sought an affordable solution that could ensure fast website delivery anywhere in the world.

Spiceworks, a company that provides a free desktop IT management application combined with an online community for IT professionals, was facing a challenge with its international users. The company's website was hosted from a single data center location in Austin, Texas, which was cost-effective for serving the domestic audience. However, Spiceworks began to notice that international users were spending less time than domestic users in the community. The company realized that Internet latency was affecting their business and that they needed to deliver community site content from locations that are closer to their international users. In Australia, for example, the Spiceworks community site would frequently deliver outdated content due to unusual and unpredictable content caching mechanisms used by Australia’s largest network provider, Telstra.