Aviatrix Blog 
As a financial services company, Better is redefining the homeownership process, making it simpler, faster, and more accessible to all Americans. A critical aspect of that goal is a network that offers aspiring homeowners high-performance connectivity, secures their data, and complies with data regulations. Better found that the native tools provided by their cloud service providers (CSPs), AWS and Azure, failed to offer the deep visibility, troubleshooting, and security they needed to manage their network. They turned to Aviatrix for a solution.
Aviatrix empowered Better to serve its customers more effectively in three areas:
Filling in Security and Compliance Gaps
Aviatrix’s solution enabled Better to fill security and compliance gaps across its multicloud network. In a time when cyberattacks like the ones on LoanDepot or Fidelity Investments can cost millions and damage brand trust, robust security that meets compliance regulations is non-negotiable.
Compliance is also a moving target for companies as regulatory bodies update or add new standards. For example, the European Union recently instituted the Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA), which provides guidelines for maintaining operational resilience in case of disruption. To meet compliance standards, companies must develop strict policies for user access, encryption, data storage, transparency, and accountability — a complex task for a multicloud network.
The native solutions provided by CSPs like AWS and Azure lack essential features that organizations need to maintain security compliance. Aviatrix fills in the gaps by providing:
- Simplified cross-cloud connectivity — CSPs like AWS and Azure protect your data within their own environments, but connections between CSPs require manual IPsec encryption, which is difficult to set up and troubleshoot. Aviatrix provides high-performance encryption and line-rate throughput, maximizing both security and performance. Our Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform also make connections easy to set up and replicate.
- Secure egress — Native security solutions may filter inbound traffic for threats, but they don’t filter outbound traffic. This lack of outbound filtering means you lack visibility into where your workloads connect — including if they’re connecting to botnets or malware hosted in problematic areas of the world. Aviatrix offers web filtering, TLS decryption capabilities, and a threat detection feature called ThreatIQ that identifies and sends alerts based on anomalies.
- Detailed logging for troubleshooting and auditing — Cloud service providers do not provide the detailed logs that networking teams can use to troubleshoot and provide records for compliance audits. Aviatrix provides detailed logs for your network.
- Resiliency support — Resiliency gets complicated in a vast network. You can ensure multiple availability zones within one CSP, but you may have to manually ensure redundancy across your network. Aviatrix offers advanced resiliency support such as high-availability gateways and multiple availability zones that cover an entire multicloud environment.
“Without Aviatrix, Better would simply not be able to meet our security and compliance requirements,” said Ali Khan, CISO of Better.
Achieving Visibility and Centralized Policy Enforcement
Maintaining visibility and policy enforcement across multiple cloud service providers and edge locations can be a logistical nightmare. Better originally brought Aviatrix in to provide orchestration: to manage and coordinate automation across systems and environments. However, they found that with Aviatrix’s Cloud Firewall solution, they could turn their distributed network from a patchwork of blind spots into a unified visibility platform.
Aviatrix Cloud Firewall provides:
- Centralized security policy creation and enforcement — Monitoring and enforcing security policies across accounts, platforms, and locations fragments a network team’s attention and energy. Aviatrix provides a unified security policy that can be centrally defined but enforced in a distributed manner closer to the workloads. This distributed enforcement minimizes data transfer that may ultimately be dropped and helps you save costs.
- Comprehensive monitoring — Cloud service providers only give you higher levels of control instead of the granular data you could access in on-premises environments. Aviatrix empowers you to monitor traffic flows, gateway statuses, and anomalies across your network.
- Network segmentation — Segmenting your network to ensure only authorized users can access the right systems and data is difficult to do natively in one cloud, and even more complicated across clouds. Whether you use a single cloud or multiple clouds, Aviatrix enables you to easily create and enforce policies for groups of resources across clouds, accounts, and locations.
Creating Integrated and Efficient Security
Using the Aviatrix Cloud Firewall solution, Better was able to integrate and optimize its security across its network. By providing a single platform where Better could monitor distributed cloud accounts, resources, and locations, Aviatrix freed Better from a growing complex cloud environment with rising cloud costs.
Aviatrix helped integrate and streamline security in two ways:
- Cost management — By replacing virtual appliance firewalls with Aviatrix Cloud Firewall, which embeds security through your network, Aviatrix helped Better reduce their data egress costs. Aviatrix can help organizations save an average of 25% in cloud costs.
- Streamlining threat analysis and response — Aviatrix helped Better streamline their security posture by simplifying the flow of identifying possible threats, analyzing each issue, and responding, reducing their mean time to respond (MTTR).
With Aviatrix’s built-for-cloud solution, Better is equipped with agility and flexibility to serve their customers more effectively — without compromising on security, performance, or costs.
- Explore Better’s story with Aviatrix.
- Learn more about how our Cloud Firewall solution strengthens security, deepens visibility, and optimizes costs.
- Try our TCO (total cost of ownership) Calculator to see how much the Aviatrix solution could save you in long-term costs.