Case Studies > With an Assist from Redis Enterprise, Malwarebytes Makes the Digital World a Safer Place

With an Assist from Redis Enterprise, Malwarebytes Makes the Digital World a Safer Place

Company Size

1,000+

Country

United States

Product

Redis Enterprise
Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
DynamoDB

Tech Stack

NoSQL
In-memory processing
Real-time streaming

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Digital Expertise
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage

Applicable Industries

Security & Public Safety
Software

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Cybersecurity
Predictive Maintenance
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Remote Asset Management

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Malwarebytes is an industry-leading anti-malware and internet security software provider. The company’s innovative real-time security tools detect and prevent malware infections for customers across the globe. The Malwarebytes Data and AI team is able to provide interactive dashboards that trace the trajectories and velocities of detected threats as they spread around the world. Malwarebytes’ use of Redis Enterprise for fast data ingestion, session management, centralized stateful storage, time series analysis, and geospatial analysis allows the company to aggregate, correlate, and visualize data in a manner and speed it believes would not be possible without Redis Enterprise.

The Challenge

Before Redis Enterprise, Malwarebytes was struggling to harness the sheer enormity of data their systems were capturing. The company had access to a wealth of malware data, but leveraging that data with the speed and efficiency necessary to drive intelligence into global and local attack vectors was a daunting task. One of the challenges at hand was to create stateful storage for several of Malwarebytes’ lifeblood data streams. They received billions of records of malware detection information, and as malware was detected, threat details were streamed to a centralized data platform. Stateful environment information was also streamed and collected separately in stateful storage for streaming data joins. Understanding environment state as malware detections were found in real-time was game-changing, providing deep insights into malware proliferation, velocities, and attack vectors that were previously impossible. Additionally, Malwarebytes’ advanced visualizations posed another big storage challenge. The visualizations provided an analysis of outbreak geography, velocities, and even insights into gestational periods of early malware formation. However, they were built on vast amounts of data and required tremendous amounts of compute resources to generate, necessitating a database that could provide centralized stateful storage and perform real-time streaming joins at a massive scale.

The Solution

Since its implementation at Malwarebytes, NoSQL Redis Enterprise has become an essential part of the backbone of the company’s real-time streaming layer. Malwarebytes relies on several standout Redis features uniquely suited to its challenging use cases. In-memory processing Redis has been benchmarked to handle over one million read/write operations per second. The blazing fast performance of in-memory Redis is critical in addressing Malwarebytes’ incredibly high throughput, requirement for real-time streaming joins, and need to access massive amounts of data at caching speeds. They tried DynamoDB, but it wasn’t fast enough, and other options like Kafka’s K-tables were fast enough but problematic and difficult to debug and ensure data consistency. Redis’ built-in data structures were another big draw for Malwarebytes. The database’s Set, Hash, and Geo Set data structures optimize the complex time series and geospatial analyses that power Malwarebytes’ dashboards. Redis provided the much-needed real-time indexing and retrieval capability for creating joins on streaming data. Malwarebytes had originally been running Amazon ElastiCache for Redis but decided it needed true high availability, scalability, and reliability, as well as an expert support team. Redis Labs and its enterprise-grade Redis brought all of those things to the table and something else: an engineering mindset. Redis Labs was willing to help Malwarebytes architect and engineer the best solution before production, ensuring a high-performing production system.

Operational Impact

Redis Enterprise provided Malwarebytes with the high availability and scaling needed to move from a conceptual prototype to a high-performing production system.
The in-memory processing capabilities of Redis Enterprise allowed Malwarebytes to handle over one million read/write operations per second, addressing their high throughput and real-time streaming join requirements.
Redis’ built-in data structures, such as Set, Hash, and Geo Set, optimized the complex time series and geospatial analyses that power Malwarebytes’ dashboards.
Redis Labs’ commitment to an engineering mindset ensured that Malwarebytes could architect and engineer the best solution before production, providing peace of mind and reliability.

Quantitative Benefit

Redis Enterprise can handle over one million read/write operations per second.
Malwarebytes processes billions of records of malware detection information in real-time.