Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Background
Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Bucharest, Romania, Safetech Innovations provides tailored cybersecurity services and solutions. With a portfolio of offerings including information security governance, cybersecurity testing and solutions, and managed detection and response, Safetech Innovations works with more than 500 clients across Europe.
For over a decade, Safetech Innovations has played a key role in protecting information systems for companies of all sizes: from small and medium sized enterprises to large industrial businesses. One of the company’s main offerings is a managed security operations center (SOC). In the SOC services division, the goal is to proactively monitor clients’ IT environments for potential threats, and detect, prevent, and respond to potential cybersecurity incidents.
Victor Gansac, Managing Director at SafeTech Innovations, explains the company’s long-term goals: “By enabling our clients to outsource their SOC, we allow them to focus on their core competencies without compromising on security. This is particularly valuable for startups—and in recent years, our client base has grown significantly. With digital transformation becoming an important topic across many industries, we saw an opportunity to grow our business further by bringing our SOC services to more clients across Europe and beyond.”
Challenge
In the past, the SOC team at Safetech Innovations relied on manual processes for information security management. As the company expanded to new markets such as the UK and US, it looked for a way to ensure that it could support the planned increase in business volumes while keeping headcount virtually flat.
Marinel Stanila, Information Security Advisory Manager at Safetech Innovations, takes up the story: “With co-financing from the European Regional Development Fund, we embarked on an innovative project: SafePIC. Our objective for SafePIC is to create automated orchestration workflows for our best-of-breed information security solutions—enabling our SOC team to serve more clients with less manual effort.”
To help bring SafePIC to market, Safetech Innovations targeted an IT infrastructure with the performance, reliability, and scalability to support large-scale, compute-intensive workloads. “We knew that our existing server platform would be unable to deliver on the demanding new requirements of SafePIC, and we decided to look for a fresh solution,” adds Marinel Stanila.
“From the start, we knew we wanted a single vendor that could provide all the server, storage, and networking components. As well as ensuring the solutions would be compatible, we were confident that a single-vendor approach would give us a higher quality of support.” —Marinel Stanila, Information Security Advisory Manager, Safetech Innovations
Why Lenovo? High Performance in a Scalable, Cost-Effective Package
After a thorough public tender process, Safetech Innovations determined that Lenovo was the optimal partner to deliver the new infrastructure platform for SafePIC. Based on eight Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 servers with high-performance 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the new solution is networked via Lenovo ThinkSystem DB610S 32 Gb FC SAN switches and connected to four low-latency Lenovo ThinkSystem DE2000H Hybrid Storage arrays.
“Lenovo ThinkSystem solutions ticked all the boxes when it came to our scalability, availability, and reliability criteria in the public tender exercise,” recalls Marinel Stanila. “We knew that our workloads on the new platform would require significant compute performance, and we were impressed by the capabilities of the onboard 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. We had also used Lenovo servers in the past, and our good experiences with Lenovo support services gave us the confidence that we’d made the right choice.”
“With ThinkSystem DE2000H Hybrid Storage arrays, we have the flexibility to deploy traditional hard-disk drives alongside solid-state storage modules. As a result, get the best of both worlds: low-latency solid-state drives to accelerate data processing, and hard-disk storage to help keep costs lean.” —Marinel Stanila, Information Security Advisory Manager, Safetech Innovations
Building a Platform for Innovation
As a next step, Safetech Innovations deployed and configured its new Lenovo infrastructure solutions. The new environment is based on a high-availability active/passive cluster of virtualized VMware vSphere servers, with data replicated to a second, geographically separate data center for disaster recovery purposes.
“Deploying the Lenovo infrastructure was very straightforward, and the quality of the solutions met all our expectations,” comments Marinel Stanila. “In the future, we plan to use VMware Horizon to deliver virtual desktops to our SOC experts, which will include automated orchestration capabilities for the information security solutions they use on a daily basis.”
“We worked with a local Lenovo distributor to take delivery of our new infrastructure solutions. The whole process went very smoothly, and we’ve been pleased with the responsiveness of the services Lenovo and its partners have provided.” —Marinel Stanila, Information Security Advisory Manager, Safetech Innovations
Results
With Lenovo ThinkSystem solutions and 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors at the heart of its IT infrastructure for SafePIC, Safetech Innovations is now sprinting ahead with the development of its value-added SOC services.
“Thanks to Lenovo and Intel solutions, we now have the robust, performant server and storage platform we need to develop the technology behind SafePIC: including workflow automation and cybersecurity analytics,” explains Marinel Stanila. “We predict that the Lenovo solution will give us the headroom to launch and grow the new offering for the next five years. When we do need to expand, Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 servers are simple and cost-effective to scale.”
Victor Gansac concludes: “Our partnership with Lenovo will empower us to innovate our information security services on a new, state-of-the-art platform, and to accelerate our research and development around emerging cyber threats.”
- Offers maximum availability for mission-critical client data
- Delivers high performance for demanding analytics workloads
- Ensures seamless and cost-effective future scalability
“Lenovo met all our criteria for a high-performance IT infrastructure, and at an extremely competitive price point. Equipped with the new platform, we’re now in an even stronger position to grow our business into international markets.” —Marinel Stanila, Information Security Advisory Manager, Safetech Innovations