Case Study

Profile

Fairphone builds ethical smartphones that they design, produce and sell. In collaboration with their partners, they are motivating the industry to make caring for people and the planet a “natural part of doing business.”

To support that mission, the Fairphone IT team deploys and maintains a fleet of bare-metal and cloud-based servers that run the business. On these servers they manage and host many of their services internally due to a strong company preference for both open source software and privacy.

Leo Makkinje is Fairphone’s Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and is tasked with securing their infrastructure. Leo and the IT Team chose Sandfly to help secure their Linux fleet against intruders, and they discuss their decision and reasoning here.

Challenge

Embrace all the help you can get when the security of your systems is at stake.

The business impact to Fairphone of not knowing if or when their systems are compromised could be “huge” - stolen employee and end-user personal information, encrypted business data or disrupted software development workflows. 

Before Sandfly, the IT team implemented common safety measures including monitoring, applying the Principle of Least Privilege and their “own common sense and expertise” to secure their Linux servers.

But they also knew that for their public-accessible servers, going beyond “good faith and the combined knowledge of the IT team” was required to protect their ethical business and its partners.

Sandfly Solution

After test-driving the tool it quickly became clear that this was the product we needed for threat detection … Sandfly Security is well worth the money because it'll notify you of potential danger before you will spot it.

Leo first read about Sandfly Security in a DigitalOcean newsletter. Upon reviewing the detailed website information, the deployment installer script and the product trial results, the IT team chose Sandfly for:

• Predefined, scanning sandflies (an extensive library of Linux intrusion and breach detection modules) to leverage the automation and help them find both known and unknown threats more quickly.
• Custom scanning sandflies to help them hunt for threats specific to their organization and provide deeper insight into their Linux fleet.
• Great customer service

Sandfly Experience

To best understand the experience of working with Sandfly Security, it is best to hear the customer in their own words:

We looked for a user-friendly tool that is easy to deploy and requires little maintenance. With Sandfly Security we get all that.Working with Sandfly Security (the company and the product) has been very pleasant. The tool is rock-solid, the people are top-notch. We were pleasantly surprised by the level of customer support. Questions are always answered quickly, with ample feedback… Best of all: knowing that Sandfly Security watches over Fairphone's server fleet makes us sleep better at night.