Why we're embracing open with Google Cloud Platform

You might recall a previous blog post about my talk at the Google NEXT conference here in London. In the talk, I explained how Google Cloud Platform (GCP) allows us to protect our clients from fraud in a fast, globally scalable way; and most critically, allows us to operate completely securely. We have recently written a case study with GCP to go into more detail about how the cloud platform has aided in our success.

With rates of online fraud up by more than 200% in the year 2015 to 2016, it’s obvious the fraud problem isn’t going away anytime soon - read more about this here. And as we learned from our roundtable with ecommerce merchants, an equally big issue is that fraudster methods are becoming more advanced. As the case study puts it,

Because fraudsters are constantly evolving their methods, Ravelin doesn’t just demand exceptional speed, security and scalability from its cloud provider, but openness and adaptability, too, so it can take advantage of open-source advances and stay one step ahead.

Google’s open-source compatibility meant it was easy for us to migrate our entire infrastructure onto GCP. The platform ensures high availability with autoscaling, so we can handle spikes in traffic in a cost-effective way, thanks to customer friendly pricing. Because fraud is a global issue, Google’s global network allows us to deploy closer to clients without latency problems.

Google is transparent about how it does its encryption by default, and encryption is absolutely critical to any company managing their own systems, transmitting data over a network or storing sensitive data, including sensitive system configurations. Cloud KMS makes it easy to implement best practices for secret management, and its low latency allows us to use it for protecting frequently retrieved secrets. So we have the cryptographic tools necessary to protect our secrets, and the features to keep encryption practical.

In only three years, we have stopped over £100 million of fraudulent transactions and analyzed over 12PBs of data. If we want to continue down this path of success, we need a cloud provider that is not only going to support us in staying ahead of the fraudsters but also give us flexibility to respond to any new developments, wherever they emerge.

Read the full case study here.

To learn more about online payment fraud visit our insights page.