Cloud-based solutions protect against email threats with AI and machine learning.

No matter how many training sessions you require or company reminders you send out, there’s always a chance that one of your employees will click on a dangerous email link. And that’s all it takes to activate malicious software or initiate a full-fledged attack on your enterprise.

The risk is real. Phishing scams aimed at tricking employees into sharing sensitive information are growing more sophisticated. Blanket spam attacks of generic emails to large groups have evolved into spear phishing schemes—highly targeted attacks on individuals in which hackers impersonate a trusted source—be it a friend, a boss, or a bank. The rise of COVID-19 has created new opportunities for hackers to exploit the current atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, with promises of financial relief, medical advice, or disease status updates.

Education is important, but it’s not enough. At Red Sift, we’ve envisioned a better way.

Automating cybersecurity

We started Red Sift in 2015 with the idea of creating an open platform to automate core cybersecurity processes. We’re big believers in machines doing what they do best. A human analyst might spend hours combing through log files to contextualize incidents and understand intent; our software-as-a-service offerings do it for them.  

Red Sift’s cloud-based solutions protect against advanced threats—the type standard email security appliances won’t catch. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, we protect our customers’ domains against email impersonation (hackers pretending to be a trusted organization or colleague), phishing, and other email threats.

The need for cybersecurity spans the globe and industries, and our customers reflect that diversity. Many of the industries we serve—such as international telecom companies, banks, media organizations, law firms, government entities, and manufacturers with complex supply chains—deal with highly sensitive information.

A robust, resilient cloud infrastructure

When we began developing our platform, we knew we needed a large amount of compute and memory and the ability to store vast quantities of data. And we wanted to create and operate the platform cost-effectively so we could pass the savings on to our customers.

We found IBM could provide us with the cloud-based IT infrastructure we needed through its Startup with IBM program, a short-term initiative for startups. We built most of our services from the ground up on a container-first microservices architecture. With IBM Bare Metal Servers as the foundation, we’ve added our own Kubernetes deployment in addition to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.

Using bare metal machines gives us a large amount of compute that functions exactly as expected—we don’t have to be concerned about unusual occurrences when running our services. By using Kubernetes and containers, we also experience the benefits of virtual machines. Ultimately, we get the best of both worlds.

The level of service and support we’ve received from IBM has been very helpful. And as our needs have grown more sophisticated, the resilience of the IBM infrastructure has allowed us to meet our service level agreements, even with high-demand customers.

Although we’re a relatively young company, we have established an external security framework and are compliant with the ISO 27001 global security standard for developing, hosting, maintaining, and supporting our solutions. IBM’s compliance with the standard greatly simplifies our auditing processes. In fact, IBM Cloud Object Storage is crucial to meeting our business continuity compliance requirements because it allows us to perform online backups that are quickly retrievable in the event of a catastrophic infrastructure failure.

Gearing up for next-generation security

We’ve had a high degree of success over the years and continue to expand our offerings. From an infrastructure perspective, we’ve been scaling up significantly and are now providing high levels of availability and low latency to large enterprises.

We continue to see an uptick in cyberattacks, especially with the recent upsurge in COVID-19-related scams. As a result of this, many companies are accelerating plans to move toward next-generation security that includes AI. We’re eagerly looking forward to continuing to work with IBM as we develop and grow our portfolio of cybersecurity solutions.

Learn more about IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service,  IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers, and IBM Cloud Object Storage.