Xero's Successful Cloud Migration and Security Transformation with Check Point CloudGuard and AWS
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Public Cloud
- Networks & Connectivity - Gateways
Applicable Industries
- Cement
- National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Tamper Detection
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
Xero is a global online platform for small businesses and their advisors, headquartered in Wellington, New Zealand. The company has built trusted relationships with 1.6 million subscribers, enabling them to thrive through better tools, information and connections. Innovation is fueling growth at a blistering pace. To support its growth, Xero did more than simply migrate to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud—it completed a massive transformation that wove security and agility into the very fabric of its product development, security engineering, and partner relationships, with AWS and Check Point as key partners.
The Challenge
In 2014, Xero, a global online platform for small businesses and their advisors, faced a challenge with its infrastructure and security. The company was managing a premises-based infrastructure that supported almost 700,000 subscribers but often found itself spending time and resources on controlling the environment, which limited the team's ability to fully support product innovation. Xero decided that only a public cloud infrastructure could provide the capabilities needed to support its next wave of growth. In addition to scaling to support millions of new customers, Xero wanted to reduce its cost of service delivery, ensure high infrastructure availability, and defend effectively against evolving cyber threats. Agility is fundamental to Xero. Hundreds of product-based teams release more than 1,200 product features and updates each year. Xero wanted to reduce the time it took to build out DevOps infrastructure from weeks, to days, to hours, to milliseconds. It also needed to support internationally recognized security standards, so the new infrastructure had to be secure by design.
The Solution
Xero chose AWS for its breadth of compute, storage, and networking services. The AWS Well-Architected framework helped Xero build a secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for the company's applications. The AWS environment gave Xero the opportunity to reduce costs, avoid downtime, and support its growth goals. For security, Xero chose Check Point as a trusted enterprise security partner for securing internal and outbound traffic. The Xero team worked closely with Check Point to implement security at every level of the infrastructure stack. They deployed 130 Check Point Gateways across 100 different AWS accounts running Check Point CloudGuard IaaS to keep data and assets safe from even the most sophisticated threats. Check Point CloudGuard IaaS delivers automated, multi-layered, elastic security that scales with the dynamic AWS environment. Xero deployed Check Point CloudGuard IaaS using a Transit VPC-style architecture. This enables traffic to be directed to a defined “security zone” for security scrubbing based on any number of attributes—regulatory requirements, policy, type of traffic, and others.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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