Customer Challenge
The agency faced significant challenges in managing and securing the vast amounts of data generated and stored across multiple departments. Key issues included ensuring data integrity, maintaining high availability, and protecting sensitive information from cyber threats. The legacy database systems in place were difficult to manage, leading to high operational overheads and increased risk of downtime. Additionally, with the rising frequency of cyber threats, there was a critical need for a robust, automated, and scalable file scanning solution to prevent data breaches and ensure compliance with strict government regulations.
Failing to address these challenges could result in severe consequences, such as potential data breaches, non-compliance with government regulations, and operational inefficiencies. This posed a significant risk to public trust, could lead to legal penalties, and incur substantial financial losses.
- Data Integrity: Ensuring the accuracy and consistency of data across various departments.
- High Availability: Maintaining continuous operation and minimizing downtime for critical systems.
- Cybersecurity: Protecting sensitive government information and other types of confidential documents from increasing cyber threats.
- Management Overheads: The complexity and difficulty of managing legacy database systems.
- Compliance: Meeting stringent government regulations regarding data security and management.
These challenges necessitated a comprehensive solution that could provide robust data management, high availability, and enhanced security, while also reducing operational overheads and ensuring compliance with government regulations.
Partner Solution
To overcome these challenges, the agency partnered with OPSWAT, particularly its File Security solution. OPSWAT integrated its MetaDefender Core product to scan files stored in Amazon S3, leveraging Amazon RDS as the backend database for storing scan results and metadata.
The solution architecture included:
- Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): The agency chose Amazon RDS to handle their database workloads due to its automated management capabilities, scalability, and high availability. Amazon RDS minimized the database management burden, enabling the agency's IT team to concentrate on more strategic tasks.
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): Files were securely stored in Amazon S3, benefiting from its durability, scalability, and robust security features.
- OPSWAT MetaDefender Core: MetaDefender Core was deployed to scan files stored in S3. This solution utilized RDS as its backend to store detailed scan results, ensuring comprehensive threat detection and that all files were safe for use.
The AWS services were delivered seamlessly, with RDS handling automated backups, patching, and scaling, while S3 provided secure and scalable storage. MetaDefender Core's integration with RDS ensured that all scanning activities were logged and readily accessible for audit and compliance purposes.
Results and Benefits
The implementation of this solution led to significant improvements in operational efficiency and data security. Specifically:
Reduced Management Overhead
Leveraging Amazon RDS helps minimize database management.
Enhanced Security
The integration of MetaDefender Core with S3 and RDS provided automated, real-time file scanning, reducing the risk of malware infiltration and sensitive data loss.
Scalability and Availability
The solution's scalability ensured that it could handle increasing data volumes without performance degradation, while RDS's high availability features minimized downtime, ensuring consistent access to critical data.
Overall, the agency achieved a more secure, efficient, and scalable data management system, aligning with their goals of enhancing government operations through advanced technology.
About OPSWAT
For the last 20 years OPSWAT, a global leader in IT, OT, and ICS critical infrastructure cybersecurity, has continuously evolved an end-to-end solutions platform that gives public and private sector organizations and enterprises the critical advantage needed to protect their complex networks and ensure compliance. Empowered by a “Trust no file. Trust no device.™” philosophy, OPSWAT solves customers’ challenges around the world with zero-trust solutions and patented technologies across every level of their infrastructure, securing their networks, data, and devices, and preventing known and unknown threats, zero-day attacks, and malware. Discover how OPSWAT protects the world’s critical infrastructure and helps secure our way of life; visit www.opswat.com.
Due to the nature of the business, the name of the organization featured in this story has been kept anonymous in order to protect the integrity of their work.
