Making Good Choices with
Infrastructure and Security in the Cloud

Abila combines decades of industry insight with technology know-how to serve more than 8,000 customers across North America. Non-profit organizations, governments and associations use Abila software to manage their memberships, raise funds, manage grants and much more. As a result, Abila stores customer data, much of it confidential in nature. Making sure the data stored in their products is secure is of critical importance. Additionally, PCI compliance is essential for merchant offerings.

The Challenge

With Abilia’s diverse customer base steadily growing in the private cloud, they know there will be emerging threats. That’s why the company determined the most useful security layer to add to their defense in depth strategy was an intrusion detection system, or IDS, to ensure multiple layers exist between the company’s hosted products and potential attackers. The Abila team evaluated several options, including open source solutions and other commercial options. Ultimately, the other offerings fell short due to demands on staff time to manually review logs and respond to events, or lack of a robust security solution to protect the network layer.

Why Alert Logic?

• Close relationship between Rackspace and Alert Logic: Rackspace could fully implement and deploy Threat Manager in their Rackspace managed environment. Abila could get network protection without having to spend time or resources doing the implementation themselves.
• Rackspace engineers collaborate with Alert Logic to provide ongoing management of Threat Manager: When anything happens in Abila’s environment, Rackspace engineers work with Alert Logic security analysts to identify, investigate and mitigate issues, while always keeping Abila apprised of the situation. It lets Abila know they’re secure, without having to be hands-on with security management.
• Rackspace manages the IT stack: Internal resources at Abila are dedicated to other projects and services due to the tight integration of Rackspace and Alert Logic.
• Regular updates and alerts: Abila is fully aware of any attacks on their applications or data by getting alerts from Rackspace if and when there’s activity. They also see results from internal vulnerability scans.

The Results

For Abila, this hands-on security monitoring from Rackspace and Alert Logic delivers considerable peace-of-mind. "While we’re fortunate to not have been the victim of a successful attack, I think a big part of that has been because of the layered defenses offered by Rackspace and Alert Logic," said Grant Howe, SVP Research & Development of Abila. "The defense layers are important … it's like a car alarm where once the robber hears the beep, they know to move on and look for a more vulnerable target."