Protecting Critical Infrastructure in Kubernetes and Rancher

“As we expand, it’s critical for our team to have both a fast and automated rollout process for each customer environment. In the end, each of our user’s access experience must be identical. Rancher is one product that’s critical to that strategy.” – Jeff Klink, VP Engineering, Cloud and Security Specialist, Sera4

Security worries keep many of us awake at night – no matter our industry. So it’s no surprise that demand for high-level, digitized security for critical infrastructure is heating up. Known as access control, this market that secures assets of national, public and economic importance is worth more than $10 billion.

Enter Sera4 Ltd., whose portfolio of keyless smart locks and controllers connect to a control and monitoring platform. Telecoms and utilities are among the sectors turning to Sera4 to automate access to their property and assets to simplify security management, improve estate security and observe local data protection laws. Sera4’s low-energy security framework, with Bluetooth at its core, connects hardware to devices and its cloud-based management platform.

With a diverse international footprint and need for reliable internet connectivity, Sera4 has always run on bare metal and VMs. However, to manage its virtualized infrastructure and drive agility and increased security, Jeff Klink and his team began to investigate Kubernetes. They considered Red Hat OpenShift but the overhead was too high. When they discovered Rancher and how it could manage scalability, upgrades and deployments on many servers and containers per day, it was “love at first sight,” says Klink.

After creating a microservices architecture, Sera4 started migrating clients into containers on Rancher. Today, Rancher is the team’s single, unified management platform for its four data centers around the world. The Sera4 platform handles millions of connections and processes terabytes of data. Read our case study to find out how Rancher gives the Sera4 platform the power to scale as its international footprint grows.