AWS Case Study: Napera

Since SMEs typically do not have the IT staff or resources to manage heavy back-end server infrastructure, Napera built out a SaaS solution, MyNapera.com designed to move all the “heavy lifting” around network management, reporting, logging and alerts into the cloud. This interface allows IT administrators to configure and set policies, view real-time status of up to 200 computers on the network, and receive alerts from anywhere at any time. To deliver this service, Napera built its overall architecture on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Our customers told us clearly that they didn’t want to add local servers, and we knew we wanted to use the Software as a Service (SaaS) model for our management layer. With AWS, we were able to leverage Amazon’s proven, best-in-class Web services computing platform, providing customers with a reliable, scalable experience that has the minimum footprint on their local network,” states Todd Hooper, CEO, Napera Networks.

“Using AWS allowed us to quickly prototype our online offering, MyNapera.com, without a large amount of upfront capital. This was especially important for us because at the time we were a startup operating with a seed round of financing.”

Napera was able to build the first version of their online system in under nine months. “Using AWS enabled us to go to market faster, since we did not have to build the services infrastructure and it was easy to transition our prototypes into our production online service,” recalls Hooper. “One of the more compelling aspects of AWS is the ease with which you can spin up new pre-configured servers (EC2 instances). This allows us to easily grow or shrink the number of running servers to scale with the number of customer deployments.”

Rather than designing appliance hardware for the management and reporting functions, Napera pushed those functions to the cloud which meant reduced costs, greater reliability and easier scalability. “This had several advantages. First, we didn’t need a local hard drive on the appliance making it both less expensive and more reliable. Second, we didn’t rely on any other software to be deployed on the local network, making our solution easier to install and manage. Furthermore, with the reporting and management functions moved to AWS, we can make many improvements to our solution without being limited by the hardware in the appliance,” explains Hooper. Currently, MyNapera.com’s online servers are comprised of EC2 instances running Rails and database instances run on EC2 using Elastic Block Store. In addition to MyNapera.com, Napera’s N24 appliance also utilizes AWS by securely storing all of its long-term logging and auditing data in Amazon S3.

Hooper further describes the inherent value of AWS, “Another important component of AWS is Amazon’s commitment and excellence in security and privacy of data, which was vital to Napera, since we are delivering a network security solution that helps our customers improve their own security and data privacy.”

To learn more about Napera’s network security solutions, visit www.napera.com .