Customer Case Study: Enabling end users secure SFTP access to data stored in Google Cloud Platforms

Bombora needed a technology that would enable clients’ SFTP access directly to their data in GCP without the need for additional processing. Here’s where the Enterprise File Fabric stepped in to provide a solution.

CHALLENGE

Bombora is the industry’s leading provider of B2B intent data, providing analytics and insight on what products and capabilities companies are researching. It is utilized by more than 70% of B2B marketers, and these firms use intent data to develop targeted marketing and sales campaigns. The events underlying intent data come from the Bombora Cooperative, a publisher co-op that includes over 4,000 highly trafficked web sites that generates over two billion web events per day. Bombora aggregates this data at a company level and provides analytics and data integrations with leading marketing and sales platforms to its co-op members and customers.

In the early stages of the company, intent data was managed on-premises in MongoDB. Data and processing volumes have grown substantially since the company’s inception. Intent data now comprises hundreds of terabytes. In 2017, the company moved its data to the cloud and selected Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) Big Query and Google Cloud Storage to house the data.

The migration to Big Query and GCS was successful but providing access to co-op partners and customers proved to be difficult. Bombora’s systems were designed to allow clients to download their data via SFTP, but GCP does not support native SFTP access to Google storage. As a result, Bombora developed automated processes to copy files to SFTP servers. Given the volumes and large size of the files, the processes were brittle and caused unnecessary delays.

USE CASE AND SOLUTION

Dave Richardson, Bombora’s VP of Technology, undertook a search for a technology that would “enable clients’ SFTP access directly to their data in GCP – without the need for additional processing.

” Bombora clients span the globe and depend on this data, so “the system has to be reliable with designed redundancy to prevent downtime”

After a market survey and evaluation, Dave selected the Enterprise File Fabric.

The File Fabric runs on Bombora’s GCP instance with two independent web instances front-ended by a load balancer. These are linked to File Fabric-replicated metadata databases also running in GCP.  This configuration provides a very resilient and reliable service and acts as an enabler for customers to quickly access their data.

The transition for customers was easy with customers only having to change the SFTP endpoint, otherwise it was completely transparent. From Bombora’s standpoint, running the File Fabric in GCP completely streamlined their processes and eliminated the time-consuming processes of moving data manually from GCP cloud storage to an SFTP server.

RESULTS

Bombora has been a File Fabric user now going on four years.

Dave Richardson, VP Technology said:

“SFTP operations run very smoothly, and the File Fabric has been very reliable and a huge time saver. I would recommend The Enterprise File Fabric to my peers.”

Download the PDF case study here.

Sign up for an enterprise trial of the File Fabric on the Google Cloud platform here.

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