How Sift enables instant responses to customers with Google Cloud

August 2020

Digital trust company leverages machine learning and Google Cloud to enhance transaction security and fraud prevention

millisecond-level: response times
50: cloud projects managed

“DoiT was a great consulting partner that gave us the big picture in simple terms and provided insights on infrastructure changes.”
Jeff McCarrell
Distributed Systems Engineer

The Challenge

With a lean engineering team and growing data volumes, Sift needed to transition from their existing hosting environment to a more scalable solution. They required deep Google Cloud expertise to navigate infrastructure changes and migrate core systems while managing a cumbersome and costly metrics system.

The Solution

Sift partnered with DoiT International to migrate to Google Cloud Bigtable as their primary datastore. They implemented reOptimize.io for cost optimization and reporting, gained enhanced visibility into cloud provisioning and spend across 50 projects, and leveraged DoiT's engineering support for infrastructure optimization.

Results

Achieved millisecond-level response times for online data processing, enabling instant customer responses
Marked decrease in latency to endpoints through Google Cloud network
Enhanced visibility and cost optimization across 50 cloud projects with granular structure
Successful horizontal scaling capabilities to support company growth
Reduced measurement complexities and cloud spend through optimized metrics system

Meet Sift

Sift is a digital trust and safety company that leverages machine learning and knowledge from more than 34,000 sites and apps to enhance transaction security and fraud prevention. With more financial transactions happening online, businesses need infrastructure to safely manage sensitive information and avoid fraud. Sift developed the first machine learning-powered digital trust and safety platform to give companies a way to prevent fraudulent activities. The platform processes huge quantities of customer data to create an accessible and informative history of events to help mitigate security threats by scoring transactions on their risk.

Overhauling the infrastructure

In shifting to Cloud Bigtable, Sift found itself balancing between two clouds. It needed a partner that had deep knowledge of Google Cloud solutions, as well as the best practices involved in making infrastructure changes and migrating core systems to new platforms. DoiT International stepped in to help navigate the solutions available, and offer the best approaches to use them. Sift also had a cumbersome and costly metrics system in place to manage its internal streaming platform.

Enhanced visibility and cost optimization

Sift uses reOptimize.io, a cost optimization and reporting tool created by engineers at DoiT, to gain enhanced visibility into its Google Cloud provisioning, use, and spend. The production side of their business has about 50 projects running in the cloud with a very granular structure. DoiT has given them detailed information on those projects and investments, allowing them to target the best areas for improvements. Sift was able to leverage DoiT to scale usage up and down for tools like Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Bigtable.

Achieving platform excellence

With Google Cloud and DoiT support, Sift is making powerful refinements to its platform. Cloud Bigtable acts as the company's primary datastore and offers the horizontal scaling needed to manage data processing demands. Sift's services are hosted on dedicated VM instances through Google Compute Engine, while the company uses Google Kubernetes Engine to support machine learning procedures and the Kafka cluster that provides queuing between services. This combination has created the foundation Sift needs to maintain a consistent global datastore without managing replication and consistency.

Expanding services for a safer web experience

Sift's mission is to make the internet safer for everyone, and that mission changes as threats evolve and customer behaviors shift. Google Cloud and DoiT have helped them scale and focus engineering efforts on delivering value instead of IT management. Data security and digital trust increasingly rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence, as powerful analytics reduce risk. Sift plans to continue building up its vertical product offerings in the coming years to support customer needs.

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Story overview

What they say

DoiT was a true partner, not a vendor. They helped us understand the problem, refine the vision, and build something production-ready far faster than we could have on our own. Their expertise, responsiveness, and commitment made all the difference.

Dr. Anish Kapur, Founder & CEO, Promptly

DoiT's Customer Success and Forward Deployed Engineering teams work very closely with us. The regular sessions with our CSM keep us focused on the right priorities, and the FDEs provide the deep technical guidance we need to validate decisions and optimize our environment. That combination has been genuinely valuable for us.

Alexander Lundberg Santos, Platform Engineer at Extenda Retail

When we started working with DoiT, we deployed Flexsave to save time and reduce complexity. We still use it today. But what really stands out is the expert support. Having someone to collaborate with on deep cloud cost topics, someone who really understands the nuances, is incredibly valuable.

Jesper Terkelsen, CTO at Monta

DoiT's Cloud Accelerator turned our AI idea into a shipped product, saving at least three months of development and delivering reliable, explainable insights our customers trust.

Scott Desgrosseilliers, CEO and co-founder, Wicked Reports

DaySmart

Working with DoiT gave us the speed of a startup and the rigor of an enterprise R&D lab. We launched an AI feature in ninety days with zero engineering lift, unified our cloud visibility across multiple products and built a foundation to scale AI responsibly.

Tim Green, SVP of AI, DaySmart

Our AWS environment had grown rapidly, and complexity was outpacing control. DoiT helped us bring structure and clarity, aligning financial and technical decisions through a shared foundation.

Maurizio Trezzi, Director of IT, Vivaticket

DoiT gives us contextual insight into what's happening in our cloud environment. That helps us ensure we're meeting customer needs while managing our costs. It's that central pane of glass that lets engineering and finance work together, powered by the technology and backed by DoiT's people.

Matt Warner, Co-Founder and CEO at Blumira

For anyone considering DoiT: do it. The tools pay for themselves. We've reduced costs, improved visibility, and built a platform that can scale globally with control and confidence.

Matej Serbec, CTO, TradeLocker

DoiT didn't just give us a product – they gave us clarity. Cloud Diagrams has helped our teams understand what we're running, why we're running it, and where we can improve. The real-time visibility is a game changer for engineering, leadership, and everything in between.

Donnie Green, VP of Platform Engineering, Bloomerang

Sentric Music

With maybe 5-10 minutes, Ava had guided me right down into the low-level detail of the services that we were running in our compute environment, named the exact instances that were starting to chew through our money, produced a report for me that showed that this was almost a direct correlation to the cost growth that we were seeing, which meant that we were able to get on top of it pretty much immediately.

Stephen Roughley, Head of Engineering at Sentric Music

Atadex

With DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ managing our procurement and DoiT's engineers acting as an extension of my team, my costs are down, my efficiency is up, and my profitability is up

Mitch Bernet, Founder and CEO at Atadex

Skyral

A key takeaway for me working with DoiT is that the level of professionalism is extremely high. They're an obvious choice if you're looking for a partner to help implement best practices in your cloud environment and reduce cost.

Oliver Young, Senior Technical Manager at Skyral

We knew WhatsApp was the perfect channel for global remittances, but building secure, real-time conversations across languages was a massive challenge. DoiT helped us break through. They didn't just advise, they helped us architect and launch a GenAI solution that's 100x more powerful than what we had. We're now in a completely different league.

Jaime Gonzalez-Gasque, CEO, Reimagination Technologies

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