Protecting and Governing Sensitive Data in the Cloud on AWS with ALTR

ALTR helps companies get the most out of their data within the constraints of legislation, data best practices, and security standards. Its software monitors data in the cloud and helps users create access policies, classify data, perform observability analyses, and protect data with tokenization.

ALTR’s solution was born on AWS. As the company grew across verticals and regions, it chose to go serverless for maximum efficiency. “Serverless technology can be deployed in different regions without costing astronomical amounts,” says Kevin Rose, director of engineering at ALTR. “That’s been a key factor in our ability to expand.”

ALTR’s serverless infrastructure is powered by AWS services such as Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service to create, maintain, and secure APIs at virtually any scale, and AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service. It also uses Amazon Neptune, a serverless graph database, to quickly access metadata and use it to make governance decisions, as well as a Snowflake data warehouse.

“Using serverless technologies, and AWS as a whole, we have built a service that is exceptionally scalable without having to scale costs,” says Chris Struttmann, cofounder and chief technology officer at ALTR. “Our business has doubled over the past year, and our AWS production expenses only increased by 2.4 percent.”

Thanks to these efficiencies, ALTR can offer highly competitive pricing, with some onboarding options starting at no cost. The solution is also highly available, providing customers with virtually uninterrupted service. The inherent flexibility of serverless architecture means that as a customer’s needs grow, the solution grows with them. Customers can start small and scale up without hefty up-front costs.

ALTR has also streamlined its security and compliance checks. “With the serverless capabilities of AWS, we no longer have to stress about updating virtual servers,” says Rose. “Instead, we manage notifications and events to verify that our AWS Lambda functions and software development lifecycle checks remain intact. We can concentrate on software security without being burdened by infrastructure security concerns.” With this robust framework, ALTR’s customers enjoy a secure and reliable service, helping them focus on their operations with greater peace of mind.

Using AWS, ALTR expanded its solution to new regions without compromising price or performance. This initiative also stimulated significant business growth; the company’s annual recurring revenue and customer count grew by more than 2 times. Its Snowflake-based annual recurring revenue also grew by more than 472 percent.

“When we started, we were scrutinized and criticized for being in the cloud,” says Struttmann. “Today, our cloud-based data access and security solution wins awards. The decision to be born in the cloud on AWS has really paid off.”