Blender Breaks Free from the Box Branch Appliance Elimination • Cloud Datacenter Integration Challenges Boaz Aviv, Chief Technical O昀케cer When Blender originally started out of their headquarters in Israel they had installed a firewall appliance from one of the top tier vendors. About Blender Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Boaz Aviv found it complex to manage, upgrade and patch. “Owning these boxes is expensive and they Eliminating borders for both need constant management. Even if the time required to manage lenders and borrowers your firewall is just 10 hours a month, that’s still 10 hours you’ve lost,” worldwide is at the heart of Blender’s peer-to-peer explains Aviv. Blender depended on an IT integrator for installation lending platform. Founded and support of the firewall appliance. When they experienced a three years ago, Blender’s system failure over the weekend, their IT integrator was not available service gives borrowers and to support them. This resulted in long downtime and impacted their lenders a simple and easy business. alternative to traditional banks lending that offers more attractive rates to both Since we moved to Cato, our bandwidth increased by parties. approximately 30 times the speed we had before. Now, Currently servicing more the customer’s Wi-Fi experience is much better. We’ve than 10,000 clients, the stopped receiving complaints since deploying Cato” company has offices in Israel, Italy, and Lithuania with plans to expand to two new territories in 2017. To be When the time came to expand to their new offices in Italy and competitive, the organization Lithuania, the team at Blender stopped to reevaluate how their office must also run especially network security footprint would impact cost and capacity going lean, both with its network forward. Without dedicating personnel to support remote appliances architecture and IT staff. with upgrades and patches, Blender would be dependent on costly third-party assistance with unreliable coverage. Also, as a financial technology organization, Blender continuously seeks to upgrade into better security services, “Although we are a Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Banking/Credit union & Financial Services 9