By Amit Sharon, Head of Customer Experience, Check Point Software Technologies

Listrak’s digital marketing platform powers revenue for more than 1,000 eCommerce and retail brands. Learn how Maestro scaled performance to unprecedented heights while simultaneously improving the company’s security posture.

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As consumers have embraced online shopping and eCommerce, Listrak has been at the front lines to help its clients capture every revenue opportunity. Michael Ibarra, Senior Network Engineer at Listrak, shared how the company overcame capacity constraints and security challenges to raise the bar on performance.

From the first day of each year, Listrak prepares for two peak days—Black Friday and Cyber Monday. During this period, network throughput triples or quadruples, processing millions of connections per second. Listrak clients depend on real-time data and insights, so Listrak must ensure 100% uptime and maximum performance. The problem was, they couldn’t.

Amit Sharon: Give us a sense of the challenge Listrak was facing in keeping up with eCommerce growth.

Michael Ibarra: We’re focused on driving revenue for more than 1,000 retail customers. During the pandemic, eCommerce achieved almost a decade’s worth of projected growth in just two years. North American eCommerce is predicted to continue to grow 35% by 2025, so we need to be in front of that. In our business, that translates to supporting real-time access to customer data and insights for our clients, as well as sending hundreds of millions of emails and SMS messages over our platform to their customers.

Amit Sharon: Why did you begin looking for a new solution?

Michael Ibarra: We had protected our network using a traditional firewall, which had reached its capacity limits, becoming unstable and unpredictable. It also was really difficult to manage. As we plan for peak days—and a growing client base—we simply can’t guess and hope that we can scale to support the traffic. We have to be sure. Of course, in addition to being able to scale to support growth, we need to ensure that the organization is protected from advanced threats and any security risks. We needed a way to achieve those two critical goals without introducing more complexity.

Amit Sharon: Why did you choose Check Point Quantum Maestro?

Michael Ibarra: Choosing Quantum Maestro was an easy decision. We can easily scale from where we are today to far beyond what was even possible before. Our team can expand a single Quantum Security Gateway up to the capacity and performance of 52 gateways in just a few minutes. No other vendor in the market even came close to meeting our requirements in a scalable design—and at such a cost-effective price point.

Today, we have four physical firewalls in our Maestro stack, and we can easily add more as we look ahead and forecast for the coming holiday season. It’s truly a plug-and-play solution.

Amit Sharon: What was this past Black Friday and Cyber Monday like for Listrak?

Michael Ibarra: Check Point gave us our best holiday season on record. We sent more than 1.5 billion emails and 30 million text messages for our clients, with flawless execution. There’s huge peace of mind knowing that performance will never be a constraint for us again.

Amit Sharon: How have the new solutions affected your team?

Michael Ibarra: I think the Check Point solutions have greatly simplified our jobs. We can see everything in a single dashboard—that’s part of the fantastic visibility we now have. We can literally scale to add firewalls in minutes. We’re now even more agile. Rapid growth? Turn on more gateways. A new zero-day threat? Adapt the security posture in seconds. Maestro’s scalability, performance, and unprecedented visibility have given us tremendous confidence in our ability to drive our customers’ revenue growth.

Amit Sharon: What would you tell other IT and security teams about your Check Point experience?

Michael Ibarra: We look for vendors who are partners and will sit down with us to plan, strategize and understand our needs. Check Point is totally aligned with our vision, and we wholeheartedly recommend them, not only as a vendor-partner, but also recommend their Quantum Maestro platform to other organizations. We’ve walked through the uncertainty of having security solutions that can’t perform or keep pace with our business, so we understand the challenges that exist. We hope our story will show other organizations that they too can achieve tremendous value and results with the complete confidence that Check Point delivers.

Read the full story at https://www.checkpoint.com/customer-stories/listrak/

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