ManagedMethods: Protecting information and experiences in the cloud
About ManagedMethods
ManagedMethods offers a cloud security access broker (CASB) that helps businesses apply additional layers of security to email and documents stored and shared in the cloud.
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Contact usBy moving to Google Cloud and tapping into the rich Google machine learning APIs, ManagedMethods is improving risk scanning performance by 20 percent.
Google Cloud results
- Identifies sensitive data and offensive content 20% faster
- Improves risk detection accuracy, reducing false positives
- Gives customers peace of mind that their data is highly secure
Up to 30% improvement in time to market
When businesses replace outdated office software with a modern cloud solution such as Google Workspace and other SaaS services, they immediately improve security, benefitting from multiple layers of protection and advanced encryption. However, there’s still the risk of a security or compliance breach if an employee emails or shares sensitive information. Traditional perimeter security solutions don’t do a good job of monitoring employees’ activities in the cloud, making it difficult for some companies to enforce their enterprise security policies for cloud apps.
ManagedMethods makes it easy for businesses to reduce their risk, offering cloud security solutions that provide visibility into the data employees share, including credit card numbers, personal information, and malicious or offensive content. With its Cloud Access Monitor, ManagedMethods complements the security features already offered by Google Workspace, empowering customers to detect and quarantine sensitive information and remediate threats before they evolve into a problem. ManagedMethods serves a wide range of industries, specializing in midmarket enterprise and K12 education.
“It’s very easy and cost effective for us to grow on Google Cloud, reducing our cloud hosting costs by 40 percent compared to our previous infrastructure where we had to reserve larger instances in anticipation of future growth.”
—Sateesh Narahari, VP Product Management & Engineering, ManagedMethodsAs a growing company, it was difficult for ManagedMethods to predict its capacity and workload requirements months in advance. However, its cloud provider required the company to pay for capacity up front and reserve compute instances of certain fixed sizes. To make matters worse, the cloud provider’s user interface was difficult to navigate and understand.
Seeking greater elasticity and flexibility, ManagedMethods moved its entire infrastructure to Google Cloud, using Custom Machine Types on Compute Engine to optimize for price and performance. When dedicated instances are not needed, it uses App Engine or Cloud Functions for cost-effective, serverless convenience.
“We wanted the true elasticity that only Google Cloud can provide,” says Sateesh Narahari, Vice President Product Management and Engineering at ManagedMethods. “It’s very easy and cost effective for us to grow on Google Cloud, reducing our cloud hosting costs by 40 percent compared to our previous infrastructure where we had to reserve larger instances in anticipation of future growth.”
“Cloud Vision API does a great job of helping us decide quickly whether an image is safe for work or school. It provides the fastest, most accurate, most mature image analysis available today.”
—Sateesh Narahari, VP Product Management & Engineering, ManagedMethodsImproving accuracy and performance
Even before moving to Google Cloud, ManagedMethods used Google machine learning (ML) algorithms, relying on Cloud Vision API to detect sensitive data contained within hundreds of thousands of images. As it becomes more commonplace for people to take pictures of credit cards and identity documents, ManagedMethods can identify and revoke the sharing of those images to prevent a possible breach. By moving to Google Cloud, ManagedMethods reduced network latency and improved risk scanning times by 20 percent, allowing it to notify customers faster of any risks.
“Cloud Vision API does a great job of helping us decide quickly whether an image is safe for work or school,” says Sateesh. “It provides the fastest, most accurate, most mature image analysis available today.”
Cloud Vision API can also detect inappropriate content in images using the same machine learning models that power Google SafeSearch, augmenting its learnings with image intelligence that Google has already identified and logged. To identify the level of risk and perform redaction on a wide range of content, ManagedMethods uses Cloud Data Loss Prevention API. ManagedMethods also uses TensorFlow to build its own ML models that run on Cloud Machine Learning Engine to perform more detailed risk detection and automatically classify documents.
“By offering the best machine learning algorithms in the world and giving us a vast community to share expertise, Google is helping us improve our time to market for new ML-driven features up to 30 percent,” says Sateesh. “When it comes to ML, I would not use anything other than Google Cloud.”
ManagedMethods also uses Cloud Data Loss Prevention API to identify inappropriate content in Gmail for K12 education customers, helping school districts detect and redact offensive text and images before they cause damage.
Flexible data services
To store data for its customer notification engine, ManagedMethods uses Cloud Datastore, a highly scalable NoSQL database. When SQL is required, it runs MySQL databases on Cloud SQL, a database service that simplifies the management and administration of MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. To keep data in motion, Cloud Pub/Sub ingests event streams and delivers them to the right components, including Cloud Dataflow for processing.
“Google Cloud gives us a wide variety of managed data services, allowing us to choose the right database for the right workload and process event streams without burdening our ops staff,” says Sateesh. “As we grow, we can keep headcount relatively flat instead of building an army of integrators.”
“When our customers find out we’re hosted on Google Cloud, they feel very comfortable. Most of our competitors are still running their own data centers, so being on Google Cloud is a big competitive advantage for us.”
—Sateesh Narahari, VP Product Management & Engineering, ManagedMethodsGiving customers peace of mind
Being on Google Cloud also helps ManagedMethods build trust with its customers and position its services as aligned with Google Workspace. Customers feel more confident knowing that ManagedMethods is hosted on the same world-class data center architecture as the Google Workspace apps they already trust.
“When our customers find out we’re hosted on Google Cloud, they feel very comfortable,” says Sateesh. “Most of our competitors are still running their own data centers, so being on Google Cloud is a big competitive advantage for us.”
Of course, it’s also comforting to customers that ManagedMethods can detect credit card numbers and personal information before they fall into the wrong hands, or prevent a classroom of children from seeing disturbing or violent images.
“We’ve found Google Cloud to be very start-up friendly and supportive of our mission to help organizations meet their shared responsibility to stay secure in the cloud,” says Sateesh. “Our customers benefit from the additional performance we’ve been able to provide even as the amount of data steadily increases.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About ManagedMethods
ManagedMethods offers a cloud security access broker (CASB) that helps businesses apply additional layers of security to email and documents stored and shared in the cloud.