Cloud security case 2: BuildFax

Property history company layers monitoring and other security services on top of Amazon EC2 public cloud offering

By Mary Brandel

June 13, 2011 — CSO —

For Joe Emison, vice president of R&D at BuildFax, scalability was the main motivator for moving the company's infrastructure to the cloud. But once there, Emison says, it quickly became apparent that IaaS was also a boon to security.

BuildFax is a leading provider of building-permit data and the only company to have consolidated this information in a national database. The database, which contains data on what BuildFax calls the life stories of buildings in 4,000-plus U.S. cities and counties, is used by insurance, financial-services, inspection and appraisal companies, and by buyers and sellers. Covering over 60 percent of U.S. commercial and residential buildings, the database contains over 6 billion data points that come from thousands of locations and are created in a variety formats, which must be processed and turned into cohesive reports.

[Also read Hybrid cloud security: Real-life tales | Cloud security basics]

BuildFax provides history reports about properties, similar to what CarFax does for cars. That means the company has to get data in about properties, process it and make it easier to read and get out.

Two tasks made scalability a major concern, Emison says: delivering the reports and processing millions of records in batch mode. BuildFax first tried hosting the reporting server internally but soon moved to a colocated solution.

Processing was a tougher problem to solve, Emison says. The average processing load required just two to three dedicated servers, but for some queries that could shoot up to 200 to 250 servers. "We didn't want to buy 250 servers for an average workload of two to three servers," he says. "We were stacking up these jobs with five servers and just having to wait, but our real need was for on-demand computing resources."

So a little over two years ago, BuildFax turned to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) IaaS solution, which allowed it to sometimes run 500 servers at a time. It wasn't long before BuildFax also moved its reporting functionality to the cloud. "We realized how immensely powerful the cloud could be to us," Emison says.

Not that EC2 provided everything that BuildFax needed. EC2 is a stable virtual hardware and operating-system platform, Emison says, but it does not include monitoring, alerts, automated backup and other infrastructure needs that BuildFax was unwilling to reinvent. For that, it turned to RightScale's cloud-management system, which provides those capabilities through a single console. The combination of RightScale and EC2, Emison says, has cut the time it takes to roll out new reporting features by 75 percent. Virtual machines can now be provisioned within five minutes, in any capacity or size. Because this happens without increasing operational and staffing costs, "we pay less in annual hosting than similar companies we know pay for batteries in the data center," Emison says.

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