Listrak Eliminates Capacity and Performance Constraints to Achieve Best-Ever Results with Check Point Quantum Maestro and CloudGuard

“Check Point gave Listrak its best holiday season on record. We sent more than 1.5 billion emails and 30 million text messages for our clients, thanks to great planning and execution by our teams.”
— Ross Kramer, co-founder and CEO, Listrak

Overview

Beginning in 2020, eCommerce and online retail sales increased at the fastest pace in history. Many retailers expanded their digital marketing efforts across new channels in order to reach consumers more effectively. For Listrak, explosive growth is good business—and a challenge. Listrak is a digital marketing platform for retailers and consumer brands. Retailers rely on Listrak to automate delivery of email and text messages to millions of customers at precisely the right time, across the right combination of channels and devices to maximize customer engagement, revenue, and lifetime value.

Business Challenge

Managing Double-Digit Growth

“We’re focused on driving revenue for more than 1,000 retail customers,” said Ross Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Listrak. “Consumers have embraced digital technologies and we need to be on the forefront of that. With North American eCommerce predicted to grow 35% by 2025, our customers must be confident that we can easily handle their growth.”

From the first day of the year, Listrak prepares for two peak days—Black Friday and Cyber Monday. During this period, network throughput triples or quadruples, processing millions of connections per second. The Listrak platform must deliver 100% uptime and maximum performance.

Until recently, Listrak protected its network using a traditional firewall. The solution had reached its capacity limits, becoming unstable and unpredictable. The firewall was also difficult to maintain.

“These hardware limitations and capacity constraints were really concerning,” said Michael Ibarra, senior network engineer for Listrak. “We simply can’t guess and hope that we can scale security to support the next holiday season and the future. We need to be sure.”

Solution

Perform, Scale, Repeat

Listrak’s team set a high bar for their new security solution. It had to deliver high performance and scale without compromise during peak retail periods. It also had to enhance the company’s overall on-premises and cloud security, and compliance posture. And it had to be easy to administer. After evaluating many different options, Listrak chose Check Point.

“We look for vendors who are true partners and will sit down with us to plan, strategize and understand our needs,” said Ibarra. “Check Point delivered the best possible solution within our budget. No other company came close to meeting our requirements in a scalable design.”

The Check Point Quantum Security Gateway family met Listrak’s requirements for its data center, and Check Point CloudGuard met the requirements for securing its AWS cloud infrastructure.

Securing the Network

Quantum Security Gateways offer a wide range of powerful security capabilities, starting with firewall, Intrusion Prevention (IPS), and VPN. IPS prevents attempts to exploit weaknesses in vulnerable systems or applications, protecting customers from the latest breaking threats like Log4J. Check Point IPS protections are updated automatically; therefore, whether the vulnerability was released years ago, or a few minutes ago, the network is protected.

Quantum Security gateways can be networked together as a powerful, hyper-scalable, high-availability system that delivers high-performance (Terabits per second) secure data throughput. This is made possible by Check Point’s Quantum Maestro Hyperscale Orchestration solution.

Check Point’s Quantum Maestro solution gives Listrak hyperscale security no matter how much its client traffic grows. Maestro scales enterprise threat prevention throughput to 1.5 Tbps and 500 million concurrent connections to support even the busiest Cyber Monday. When the team needs to add capacity, they simply install another Quantum Security Gateway; it automatically inherits the existing configurations, policy, and software—making scalability simple.

“Check Point Quantum Maestro was an easy decision,” said Ibarra. “We can easily scale from where we are today to far beyond what was possible before, and it’s far more cost-effective than competitive flagship platforms.”

Securing the Cloud

Listrak also chose Check Point CloudGuard Security Posture Management (CSPM) to augment cloud-native security with industry-leading security intelligence, analysis, and alerting capabilities. CloudGuard automates governance across the AWS cloud and data center environments. Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence adds another threat detection layer. Automatic signature detection, built-in rules, and threat intelligence feeds create a baseline of account activity. Once this baseline is established, built-in AI and anomaly detection algorithms can spot potentially unauthorized or malicious activity in cloud environments, including serverless applications.

Benefits

Best Season Ever

“Check Point gave Listrak its best holiday season on record,” said Kramer. “We sent more than 1.5 billion emails and 30 million text messages for our clients, thanks to great planning and execution by our teams.”

With Maestro’s scalability, growing security capacity is as simple as adding hardware resources. Maestro enables a single security gateway to expand up to the capacity and performance of 52 gateways in just a few minutes.

“We moved from capacity uncertainty to easily sustaining maximum performance and scale,” said Ibarra. “There’s great peace of mind knowing that performance will never be a constraint for us again.”

Industry’s Best On-Premise and Cloud Security
Check Point Quantum’s industry-leading threat prevention and zero-day protection effortlessly boosted Listrak’s overall security. Quantum stops advanced and unknown threats while delivering safe email and content to users.

With CloudGuard Posture Management, Listrak gained unprecedented threat visibility. Built-in AI and anomaly detection algorithms spot potentially unauthorized or malicious activity within cloud environments, including serverless applications. Administrators receive real-time policy violation and intrusion detection alerts based on user-defined criteria. CloudGuard’s ability to automatically assess security posture, detect misconfigurations, and enforce security best practices saves hours of time for the security team.

“Check Point stops threats faster than any other vendor has in our environment,” said Ibarra. “We now have tools to actually see what’s entering our environment. The visibility Check Point offers is second to none.”

Outstanding Results

Listrak’s security team can now respond immediately to business trends from a single dashboard. Rapid growth? Turn on more gateways. A new zero-day threat? Adapt the security posture in seconds. Unmatched scalability, maximized performance, and unprecedented visibility give Listrak renewed confidence in its ability to drive customers’ revenue growth.

“Having partners aligned with our vision is critically important,” said Ibarra. “We wholeheartedly recommend Check Point Quantum and Check Point Maestro to other organizations. They can see the tremendous value and results we’ve achieved and have complete confidence in Check Point delivering beyond our expectations.”