Best Friends Animal Society's Serverless Architecture for Enhanced Security and Efficiency
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Application Security
Applicable Industries
- Cement
- National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions
- Procurement
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Tamper Detection
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Founded in 1983, Best Friend Animal Society is the nation’s largest no-kill non-profit animal sanctuary. They save 17 million dogs and cats annually and have grown their base to 10 regional shelters in addition to their headquartered sanctuary in Utah. They work with local shelters to transform metropolitan areas into no-kill zones and safe havens for dogs and cats. Solely relying on the generous donations from their donor community, they have the ambitious goal of reaching no-kill status for dogs and cats nationwide by 2025. To achieve this goal, and generate awareness, they created a dynamically updated map to monitor the animal save-rate nationwide leveraging AWS Data Lake and hosted on AWS Lambda.
The Challenge
Best Friends Animal Society, the largest nonprofit no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States, was facing challenges with their traditional infrastructure. It was slowing down their development speed and hindering their ability to meet strategic goals. They needed a solution that would allow them to quickly scale, deploy new projects, lower their operational costs, and enhance their security. After migrating to AWS Lambda, they found that their permissions were too restrictive, and their developers could not develop at the speed necessary to achieve their strategic goals because of security. Projects were getting delayed because the development team could not access AWS S3 buckets. They wanted to take advantage of the benefits serverless had to offer but knew they had to have security gates in place to protect donor information. They needed to find and implement a layer of security to their AWS Lambda deployment.
The Solution
After careful evaluation, Best Friends Animal Society selected Check Point CloudGuard Dome9 serverless solution to automate security at the code level for their AWS Lambda serverless applications and to create additional rules and policies for further application hardening. This would ensure that they always had the necessary permission levels and control to enable their development team to run fast while protecting sensitive IP. They were quickly able to deploy CloudGuard’s serverless solution into their AWS Lambda environment to monitor the function layers and update permissions, and are now able to execute new code seamlessly through the convenience of the C/CD tool. In addition, CloudGuard applies deep-code flow analysis and machine-based learning to build a model of normal function and application behavior, to automatically limit permissions, and either block or trigger an alert for any actions outside of that established scope.
Operational Impact
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