H2O.ai4x

Upwind in Action: H2O.ai

Customer
h20_ai-alt-1.svg
Industry
Artificial Intelligence
Use Case
Contents
Customer
Industry
Artificial Intelligence
Use Case

H2O.ai: Simplifying Cloud Security with Upwind’s Runtime CNAPP

Upwind is security for DevOps.

Asaf Oren
Asaf OrenDirector of Cloud Development, H20.ai

Challenges

  • H2O.ai previously required multiple tools to secure their cloud, resulting in costly and noisy solutions.
  • H2O.ai previously struggled with too many alerts, making it difficult to prioritize tasks for their DevOps & Security teams.
  • H2O.ai needed a unified solution that would give them end-to-end visibility of their cloud infrastructure in real time.

Solutions

  • Upwind’s CNAPP helped H20.ai consolidate and replace multiple tools.
  • Upwind’s use of runtime insights provided H2O.ai’s DevOps & Security teams with clear, prioritized detections and tasks – helping increase their focus and productivity.
  • Upwind’s combination of runtime insights and CI/CD awareness gives H20.ai 
end-to-end visibility of their cloud infrastructure, in real time.

About H2O.ai

H2O.ai enables businesses, government entities, nonprofits and academic institutions to make, operate and innovate with AI to accelerate responsible innovation. H2O.ai leverages Upwind’s CNAPP for a number of use cases including vulnerability management and network visibility.

A surfboard with a yellow H2O.ai sticker leans against a palm tree on a sandy beach. The ocean waves and a clear blue sky are visible in the background.

Improve Collaboration Between DevOps & Security Teams

Prior to using Upwind, H20.ai said their DevOps and Security teams often were siloed and lacked clear task prioritization. Upwind’s use of eBPF-powered runtime insights, paired with data from CloudTrail, IAM, and Identity Center, helps their teams to not only see and understand their most critical detections, but to also receive clearly prioritized tasks. By combining data from both Upwind and AWS, H2O.ai is now able to better eliminate false positives, focus their teams and cut out more than 90% of noise, and get to the root cause of risks and threats 10x faster.

Upwind provides H20.ai with real, actionable DevSecOps context and bridges the gaps between DevOps and Security teams. While Upwind was purchased for the security team, the DevOps team were major advocates of the purchase and actively use the platform.

Upwind is security for DevOps. It saves us time, it minimizes the gap between teams and they have more collaboration today. Upwind really changed the way we handle security today.

Asaf Oren
Asaf OrenDirector of Cloud Development, H20.ai

Focus Teams & Consolidate Noisy Tools

Prior to using Upwind, H2O.ai’s security engineers needed to use multiple tools to achieve end-to-end visibility of their cloud infrastructure. This often resulted in noisy alerts and multiple dashboards that the security team would need to manage in order to have the needed visibility.

With Upwind, H2O.ai’s security team was able to consolidate multiple tools, saving both time and money. Having a centralized security platform also helps their team to focus on their truly critical detections and improve their time to remediation, rather than sorting through noisy alerts.

We have consolidated multiple products while giving security engineers end-to-end visibility, which we previously needed to use multiple products for.

Asaf Oren
Asaf OrenDirector of Cloud Development, H20.ai

Real-Time, End-to-End Visibility of Cloud Infrastructure

One of the most important aspects of a security tool for H2O.ai is the ability to have real-time, end-to-end visibility of their cloud infrastructure. 

H2O.ai is an AI-driven company that retains a large amount of sensitive customer data. While previous solutions gave the organization some insight into their infrastructure, they needed the ability to identify any potential threats or vulnerabilities in real time. 

By using Upwind’s runtime-powered CNAPP, they can view any suspicious activity as it occurs and take immediate action to safeguard their customer data and stop malicious attacks. This end-to-end visibility gives them a full understanding of the threat landscape, including across application load balancers and auto-scaling groups, services such as RDS and S3, and all of their running infrastructure such as AWS EC2 and EKS.

Easy Installation & Operation

One of things that the H2O.ai team loves the most about Upwind is its ease of use – both within the platform and the interface with the Upwind team.

While many solutions require a complicated, painful setup, H2O.ai was able to install Upwind and start viewing real-time insights in under 5 minutes. Upwind’s lightweight eBPF sensor makes the installation a smooth and simple process, and the H2O.ai team can monitor and track all of the Upwind sensors from directly within the Upwind platform. 

In addition to making the platform easy to install and operate, H2O.ai says their experience with the Upwind team has been similarly easy and fruitful, with Upwind rapidly developing new capabilities, rapidly responding to any requests or company needs and providing a strong support system for H2O.ai’s security and DevOps teams.

See what H2O.ai had to say about Upwind when they first started using the platform

With Upwind, we are able to identify any vulnerabilities and can prioritize them for remediation — helping us operate more efficiently and securely.

Varun Brahmkshatriya
Cloud Engineer

Solutions

  • Upwind built support for gVisor, enabling Spacelift to gain process-level visibility into isolated containers from inside the platform, without an additional abstraction layer.
  • Upwind’s runtime-powered detection drastically reduced incident response times, allowing engineers to see exactly what happened inside containers and take quick action — whether that meant alerting the customer, killing a malicious process, or preventing future abuse.
  • Custom POC collaboration enabled rapid iteration, with Spacelift testing real-world attack patterns observed in wild malware samples, and Upwind delivering tailored features in record time.
  • Dynamic network graphs and runtime vulnerability prioritization allowed the team to track service communication patterns, identify drift, and focus on real exploitable risks — not just theoretical ones
Spacelift’s use of gVisor provided strong sandboxing and tenant isolation, but it came at the cost of visibility. The lack of runtime insight made it time-consuming to monitor network activity and understand events leading up to a security incident. Upwind’s gVisor feature solved this problem, providing Spacelift with full visibility into what was happening inside containers in real time. They could now trace every process, identify the actor behind it, and act decisively — all while preserving the container isolated gVisor was designed to enforce.

Visibility Inside Isolated Containers

Spacelift’s use of gVisor provided strong sandboxing and tenant isolation, but it came at the cost of visibility. The lack of runtime insight made it time-consuming to monitor network activity and understand events leading up to a security incident. Upwind’s gVisor feature solved this problem, providing Spacelift with full visibility into what was happening inside containers in real time. They could now trace every process, identify the actor behind it, and act decisively — all while preserving the container isolated gVisor was designed to enforce.

We tried reaching out to other vendors, but Upwind was the only one who moved fast, built what we needed, and treated us like a real partner. That’s rare — and it made all the difference.

Varun Brahmkshatriya
Cloud Engineer

Outcomes

  • Upwind built support for gVisor, enabling Spacelift to gain process-level visibility into isolated containers from inside the platform, without an additional abstraction layer.
  • Upwind’s runtime-powered detection drastically reduced incident response times, allowing engineers to see exactly what happened inside containers and take quick action — whether that meant alerting the customer, killing a malicious process, or preventing future abuse.
  • Custom POC collaboration enabled rapid iteration, with Spacelift testing real-world attack patterns observed in wild malware samples, and Upwind delivering tailored features in record time.
  • Dynamic network graphs and runtime vulnerability prioritization allowed the team to track service communication patterns, identify drift, and focus on real exploitable risks — not just theoretical ones
Upwind grants Petrofac the ability to instantly identify threats and eliminate malicious processes with the click of a button. It also creates prevention policies to block future malware from running in their environment.
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