Customer Story

Delivering real-time risk decisions at global scale and speed

About the company

LexisNexis Risk Solutions

LexisNexis Risk Solutions

LexisNexis ThreatMetrix is a global enterprise solution for digital identity intelligence and digital authentication, trusted by leading global brands to inform daily transaction decisions. By combining insights built from billions of transactions with analytics and machine learning, ThreatMetrix fraud prevention solutions unify decision analytics across the entire customer journey.

Challenge

Scaling the world’s largest identity network with real time risk decisions

LexisNexis Risk Solutions, formerly ThreatMetrix, gives customers the ability to support a better experience for end customers while keeping fraud volumes low. Each day, when a customer requests a risk decision from the decision engine, it uses information crowdsourced from 5000 companies globally to:

  • Handle over 130 million real-time transactions across 40,000 websites to quickly determine which requests are legitimate customers versus cyber threats
  • Process two billion API transactions per month from 4.5 billion active devices
  • Perform calculations that include anonymized device profiling, smart rules, smart learning, and data from hundreds of properties stored in the data warehouse
  • Return hundreds of attributes that inform the customer whether the request is a cyberthreat or comes from a real user in less than 100 milliseconds
Scalabilitiy

Scaling for massive amounts of data

Scale data volume over 2.5x from 450TB to 1.3PB

Predictable performance

Needs to handle heavy mixed workloads of millions of transactions per second across the entire dataset

Scale real-time business decisions

Provide accurate and <300 ms responses even as the amount of data and requests grow

Easy to administer and operate

Maintain and manage a small number of nodes that is easy to administer and operate
Solution

Reducing fraud while delivering accurate, frictionless transactions

With Aerospike, LexisNexis Risk Solutions eliminates the risk that they experienced with Cassandra of unknown costs associated with uncontrolled scale. Aerospike provides sub-millisecond latency performance despite dramatically increased number of requests, throughput requirements, and a limited operations team. With Aerospike’s hybrid memory architecture that keeps the index in-memory and data on SSD, LexisNexis Risk Solutions can handle hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second, replication across multiple datacenters with minimal latency, and provide customer decisions globally to help distinguish real requests from cyberthreats.

Low latency global replication

Two replica sets located around the world with <500ms latency

Improved manageability

Easier to administer, operate, and expand with limited operations team resources

Reduced average request latency

Faster response times with latency reduction from 120ms to 30ms

Scale high performance under heavy write workloads

Eliminate bottlenecks and achieve I/O capacity for millions of reads and writes per second
Results

Achieving scale while saving costs

When LexisNexis Risk Solutions hit performance and scaling challenges with their legacy solution, Cassandra, they moved to Aerospike for a solution that was easier to manage, saved costs, and delivered predictable performance even as their data needs scaled.

3.4x reduction in server footprint

From 96 servers down to 28

4x reduction in average request latency

Latency reduced from 120 ms to 30 ms on average

$3.3M cost savings

With reduced footprint, $3.3M projected cost savings per TB over 3 years

Predictable performance, costs, and growth

The team at LexisNexis Risk Solutions values how Aerospike’s expertise and support provide accurate specifications and sizing that meet performance and growth requirements.

See how Aerospike can help you scale.

 

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