Cybersecurity leader, Claroty, Cuts Apache Kafka® Costs in Half with Aiven BYOC

Securing critical infrastructure with 300% growth in four years

Claroty has become one of the dominant providers of cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. Its solutions secure the cyber-physical systems in factories, banks and, more recently, hundreds of hospitals in the US and Europe. By early 2024, the company’s annual recurring revenue surpassed USD 100 million, following a four-year period in which it grew its customer base by 300% (source).

The company already protects millions of devices in the extended internet of things (XioT) landscape and plans to grow that number still further. “We want to position ourselves as the market leader, grow our customer base and protect as many companies as possible in new sectors and new geographies, including Asia-Pacific,” says Matan Mizrahi, Senior DevOps Engineer at Claroty.

Optimizing Apache Kafka deployments

Claroty has relied on Apache Kafka for its data-streaming capabilities for many years. The real-time analysis of data flows provides critical insights into potential vulnerabilities, safeguarding both individual devices and entire environments.

But as the number of Claroty customers and associated devices increased, the company’s data volumes soared. For example, the Kafka data storage requirements were increasing by 5-10% every quarter resulting in spiraling costs. Claroty launched an initiative to reduce spending on data infrastructure and increase cost efficiency.

“Our business needed better economies of scale to enable us to support new customers or new deployments efficiently,” says Mizrahi. “Our existing set-up was limiting our ability to fulfil our business growth and revenue ambitions and was preventing us from protecting even more companies worldwide.”

BYOC cuts Kafka TCO by 72%, infrastructure costs by 50% and network costs to near zero

Claroty chose to adopt Aiven for Apache Kafka on AWS using Aiven’s Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model. As part of the migration, Aiven Solution Architects helped right-size and right-scale Claroty’s Kafka clusters to match its current data requirements — and to give it the room to grow.

Working with Aiven’s Kafka experts and using the BYOC on AWS setup reduced Claroty’s costs swiftly and significantly. “We reduced the TCO of running our Apache Kafka clusters by 72% which equates to a saving of millions of dollars each year,” says Kirshenbaum. “The Aiven BYOC on AWS model enabled a 50% saving in cloud infrastructure costs, and network costs are now near zero.”

These savings have been achieved in several ways. The BYOC deployment allows Claroty to take advantage of AWS credits, discounts and Savings Plans, hence maximizing the reductions on offer. Aiven also enabled Claroty to use Graviton instances, unlocking AWS credits equating to a USD 100,000 saving.

In addition, Claroty has been able to take advantage of Aiven’s single availability zone communication. This reduces the AWS availability zones that Claroty uses from three to just one, and all but eliminates the cost of network traffic.

Achieving compliance and multi-cloud agility

The BYOC model also helps Claroty meet stringent regulatory demands for handling sensitive data, including financial and medical information. With data residing in its AWS cloud environment, Claroty has strengthened data control and can better adhere to data sovereignty and liability agreements.

“Ensuring consistency with security and compliance is mission-critical to what we do. Maintaining the governance of our data meant it had to reside in localized cloud environments but this was an increasing financial burden. BYOC was the only way we could manage the challenge of spiraling data volumes with regulatory requirements regarding where data resides,” says Kirshenbaum.

In addition, working with Aiven gives Claroty the possibility of deploying services to multiple clouds. For example, since Aiven for Apache Kafka went into production, Claroty has taken advantage of Aiven’s multi-cloud capabilities by deploying Aiven for PostgreSQL® in Microsoft Azure.

“We’re cloud agnostic, so we like the flexibility of Aiven. That supports us when we enter more sectors and acquire new customers each with their specific requirements,” says Mizrahi.

Claroty embraces the future with Aiven

In the future, Claroty wants to move some of its calculations from PostgreSQL to Aiven for ClickHouse® on AWS and is running a proof of concept in its Quality Assurance environment.

“Economies of scale are important because business growth isn’t just about data volumes, it’s about how much it costs us to support a new client or a new deployment. To look after more companies we need the right partners and a financially sustainable data infrastructure. Working with Aiven has given us that, and I am confident we will develop an even deeper relationship in the future,” says Kirshenbaum.