Case Study

Fortra Cloud Updates Solution

How revx eliminated unpredictable cloud costs and delivered reliable, region-based update distribution for Clearswift, part of Fortra.

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The Client

About Clearswift (Part Of Fortra)

Clearswift — acquired in 2019 — is now part of Fortra (the former HelpSystems, rebranded in 2022), a global cybersecurity leader. Clearswift remains a cornerstone of Fortra's data security offering, and is trusted by organisations worldwide to protect critical information from inbound cyber-threats and prevent outbound data loss — enabling secure collaboration while supporting business growth.

Clearswift's suite of products continues to deliver consistent protection across email, web, cloud and endpoints. Its adaptive data loss prevention technology ensures organisations retain full visibility of sensitive information the whole time, while avoiding business disruption.

Fortra identified Clearswift's unique capabilities as a critical component of its expanding cybersecurity portfolio and integrated the company into a broader unified offering. Operating globally with offices and support teams around the world, Fortra delivers a “follow-the-sun” level of support — giving customers access to expert assistance regardless of region or time zone.

Together, Fortra and Clearswift help organisations meet rising demands for data protection, compliance and secure collaboration in an increasingly complex threat-landscape.

2022

Fortra Rebrand

Global

Operations

24/7

Follow-The-Sun

At A Glance

Challenge, solution, outcome.

A summary of what Clearswift faced, how revx approached it, and the measurable results delivered.

Challenges

The Problem

Unpredictable public-cloud data charges
Rising global update-delivery costs
Need for scalable, reliable distribution

Solution

How We Solved It

Regionally deployed update servers
Predictable, controlled cost model

Benefits

What Was Achieved

Significant annual cost reduction
Faster, region-based update delivery
Stable, predictable operational spend

Client Testimonial

We (Clearswift) do not have our own data centres in which we can host our applications for customers, we rely upon revx to provide this and have a great relationship with the people, which in turn provides our customers with the service they expect. Managing a hosted or managed service environment for customers isn't easy at the best of times, but innovation from revx ensures that we can do this quickly and efficiently.

Alyn Hockey

VP Product Management, Fortra

Requirements

Understanding the challenge.

Clearswift provides all security updates to their customers deployed around the world including Anti-virus and Anti-spam signatures every few minutes to ensure customer systems are kept relevant. As well as threat updates, product updates would also need to be distributed periodically and additional bandwidth would be needed to deal with customers wanting to update their systems without impacting the time sensitive delivery of threat updates.

The update service was originally an on-premise solution and due to increasing customer numbers, Clearswift faced the decision of investing in additional CAPEX to refresh the update service hardware or migrate to cloud-based infrastructure. The decision was taken to migrate from on-premise to a public cloud deployment.

Having successfully achieved this migration, Clearswift experienced an unexpected increase in operational costs associated with the update service, with annual cost increasing by up to 200%.

Being alerted to this increase in expenditure, Clearswift initiated an analysis of the public cloud cost structure, with the objective to identify both the reason for the cost increase and a proposed solution that would return the business to the expected monthly cost.

The analysis of the public service highlighted an unknown cost specific to ‘data transfer’ charges incurred through data downloads, which increased the expected monthly cost by up to 300% depending on the amount of data transferred in the period. Clearswift, therefore, looked at options for a cloud-based partner who could deliver the service required with a planned and consistent cost.

Key Finding

Hidden ‘data transfer’ charges on the public cloud inflated expected monthly costs by up to 300% — far exceeding the originally projected operational budget.

The revx Solution

Migrating to private cloud.

revx understood that using public cloud services would carry hidden connectivity costs and proposed a solution to migrate the Clearswift Update Servers onto zsah infrastructure. The international reach of zsah, with Data Centres covering the EMEA, Americas and Asia Pacific regions, also provided Clearswift with the option of deploying their update services in the regionally appropriate geography.

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Benefits

Measurable outcomes.

revx enabled Clearswift to meet the operational objective in terms of returning the business to expected cost levels supported by the annual operating budget, as well as providing a more effective solution for Clearswift customers in the U.S. through the deployment of update servers in the appropriate geography.

Overall, moving from public cloud to zsah's private cloud for this specific service helped Clearswift achieve its objective of greatly reducing annual cost and achieving predictable and stable costs.

Outcome

Clearswift returned to expected cost levels, achieved predictable operational spend, and gained faster update delivery for customers through regionally deployed infrastructure.

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