IT security solutions provider reduces development time with AWS
Avira is an IT security solutions company founded in Germany in 1986 and based in the German city of Tettnang. The company was among the pioneers of the freemium software model and, since being founded, has grown to protect the devices of over 100 million users worldwide, employing around 500 people globally.
As part of the ever-changing industry of online security and with a constantly evolving product suite, Avira’s development teams are always working on fresh products, each requiring a unique hosting environment. On several projects, Avira found that it required more scalability than its local data center offered and that the cost required to set up physical servers for others was too high. As a result, it began looking into cloud providers.
Avira settled on Amazon Web Services (AWS), saying that it fit the company’s three criteria for project hosting: scalability; redundancy; availability. Avira’s project environments are isolated with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and the company’s Cloud Services Manager Cristian Toader estimates that they use between 60-70 per cent of AWS’s available services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for compute instances and Amazon Simple Storage Service for persistent object-level storage.
In order to optimise uptime, Avira uses AWS’s global regions and multiple Availability Zones, while it caches a large amount of content at Amazon CloudFront edge locations. Avira's Cosmin Ancuta commented: “A benefit of using AWS is being able to deploy as close as possible to the user. Many of our projects use CloudFront to store cascading style sheets, images, and JavaScript for faster loading times.”
The greatest benefit Avira has seen from AWS is speed, enabling its developers to quickly bring their ideas to life and focus on development rather than on tasks such as hardware and specs. According to Toader, AWS has allowed Avira to reduce the time to predict and budget service infrastructure 80 per cent, enabling it to speed up deployment.
AWS has also improved Avira’s global operations in Germany and Romania, ensuring both locations are up to date on all sides. Meanwhile, it has saved money that it would otherwise have spent on underutilised hardware.
