INDUSTRY: Technology
COMPANY SIZE: 1-10 Employees
HEADQUARTERS: Troy, NY
Ramagine partners with some of the world’s leading threat intelligence and security firms to protect clients from cyber-attack. Ramagine Bazaar, its new reverse-engineering-as-a-service (REaaS) product, promises to rethink how global teams can collaborate to analyze malware threats. Red Hat OpenShift ensures Ramagine has the freedom to run on a secure Kubernetes distribution and container platform on any cloud provider while maintaining the utmost security.
‘We’re not a big team and when we have a question or an issue comes up, it’s answered immediately. We had excellent presales support from Axcelinno, and our support team is right there to help us with a fix or a workaround. Effectively both Red Hat and Axcelinno are part of our team, which is a big deal for a business like ours that’s just starting to scale.’
— Cameron Hackett, Co-Founder and COO, Ramagine
Key Results
- Enabled a transformative approach to threat analysis
- Decreased time to stand-up new services from days to minutes and simplified deployment process to secured private cloud environments
- Strengthened confidence in the platform with enterprise-level support
- Elevated the developer experience and simplified interfaces and architecture
Services & Partner Ecosystem Technologies
- Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform
Challenge: Collaborative Analysis To Counter Malware Threats
Ramagine’s mission is to change the cybersecurity and threat intelligence space. It aims to equip tier-three operators, analysts, and researchers with the tools they need to counter cyber threats. Increased efficiency, collaborative working, and reverse engineering promises to reimagine how malware analysis is conducted.
The nature of cybersecurity at these highest levels requires reliable solutions that are easily and swiftly deployed. “Reverse engineering has quickly become an important defensive weapon against potential threats. Our clients see this work as providing them with a powerful shield,” said Ramagine Co-Founder and COO Cameron Hackett.
He described Ramagine as a “beachhead product” in the cybersecurity industry: a platform to enable REaaS, allowing global teams to collaborate on malware analysis and research. In order for Ramagine to be effective, it would need the scale to expand rapidly, while maintaining distributed version control. Specifically, Ramagine would need to run services across multiple data centers with a persistent connection.
“Many of the tools used by software engineers and malware analysts are 20 years old,” said Lucien Brulé, Ramagine’s Co-Founder and CEO. “Ramagine enables users to collaborate in real-time, on their own browser, on current malware versions. In terms of our ability to fight new malware threats, it will create a multiplier effect.”
Solution: Bringing Dynamism To The Cybersecurity Industry
SOFTWARE
- Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform
Enabled a transformative approach to threat analysis
The flexibility of Red Hat OpenShift is critical, considering Ramagine’s position as a start-up in the cybersecurity space. Red Hat OpenShift answers both the technology and business needs for Ramagine.
“We saw that we would be susceptible to strong vendor lock-in if we were limited to a particular cloud,” said Brulé. “If, for whatever reason, that cloud provider decided not to do business with us, we would be stuck. Red Hat OpenShift gives us complete freedom of movement.”
This freedom of choice helps Ramagine’s costs and supports customers’ cloud decisions.
Ramagine initially intends to market itself to marketing and threat intelligence teams at security companies that need to augment and enhance their capabilities around specific malware strains. Reverse engineering through community collaboration will hasten the time to insight. This is possible because the full collaboration allowed by Red Hat OpenShift helps by distributing various reverse engineered artifacts, consisting of hybrid binary, network packet captures, and text files.
“Launching REaaS would have been extremely difficult for us without Red Hat OpenShift,” said Brulé. “It has the technical requirements we need and it can be run by a small team.”
Decreased time to stand-up new services from days to minutes and simplified deployment process to secure private cloud environments
The Ramagine development team had a clear need for a platform that would allow for lightning-fast deployments. “Speed of deployment is critical in this field and that flexibility we get from OpenShift gives us an advantage,” said Hackett.
Red Hat OpenShift has allowed the team to collaborate more and experiment with different applications, resulting in more creative security solutions. Ramagine’s team is relatively small, which makes using Red Hat OpenShift a plus since it allows them to easily manage clusters. Deployments into secure private clouds also benefit from the platform’s ability to navigate different environments and open source integration.
Strengthened confidence in the platform with enterprise-level support
Despite Ramagine’s small size compared to other Red Hat clients, Brulé and Hackett were impressed by the level of service they received from the Red Hat support team. This helped accelerate platform development and build certainty in the technology. With clarity around Red Hat’s technology roadmap, the close working relationship also strengthens faith in Ramagine’s ability to grow.
“We’re not a big team and when we have a question or an issue comes up, it’s answered immediately,” said Hackett. “We had excellent presales support from Axcelinno, and our support team is right there to help us with a fix or a workaround. Effectively both Red Hat and Axcelinno are part of our team, which is a big deal for a business like ours that’s just starting to scale.”
Elevated the developer user experience and simplified interfaces and architecture
Users of Ramagine are able to connect to a private workspace in the cloud where they’re able to run arbitrary workloads, a feature loved by the users and made possible by Red Hat OpenShift’s simple architecture. “We saw early on that OpenShift was the obvious choice for us because it was inherently easier to operate for a small team,” said Hackett. “It integrates very nicely with anything we’re running.”
‘We saw that we would be vulnerable if we were limited to a particular cloud. Red Hat OpenShift gives us complete freedom of movement.’
— Lucien Brulé, Co-Founder and CEO, Ramagine
Results
“We can’t imagine our stack without Red Hat products,” said Brulé. “We trust them and they have great trust among our customers, which you need in cybersecurity.”
With version two of the product in the works, Ramagine hopes to bring more attention to REaaS with the assistance of Red Hat OpenShift. The team is expecting to create a ‘one-click deployment’ version of Ramagine Workspaces, which would create an even simpler user experience.
The rollout, expected in late 2022, is expected to target not just developers interested in reverse engineering but includes anyone who does security and high-knowledge work.
“We see the future of Ramagine as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that is enabling the hosting platform,” said Brulé. “This creates a place where all of the tools, plus the collaboration platform, are available in an online bundle.”
About Ramagine
Ramagine plans to change the information security world by equipping analysts, operators, and researchers with tools that provide collaboration, teamwork, ease of use, and increased efficiency to effectively protect from threats found around the world.
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