CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Upwind in Action: H2O.ai
Industry: Artificial Intelligence
Challenges
- H2O.ai’s 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
