Verisure, a prominent player in the security industry, is the leading provider of professionally monitored security systems with 24/7 response services across Europe and Latin America. With presence in 17 countries, Verisure serves over 5 million customers, building a solid reputation in the market. In Spain and Portugal, the company operates under the brand Securitas Direct.
With a workforce exceeding 25,000 employees, Verisure is driven by its mission to provide world-class services and make the world safer.
At-a-Glance
Verisure, a leading European provider of security systems, is on a mission to protect families and businesses with innovative solutions. As it continues to modernize and adapt to new technologies, the company sought to enhance its operations and deliver value to customers by adopting Kubernetes and microservices architecture. By leveraging Rancher Prime, Verisure successfully migrated its clusters, improved developer experience and ensured reliability for critical services. With that, the brand can stay ahead of the curve and continue providing exceptional security services to millions of customers across Europe and Latin America.
The journey to containers
In the current fast-paced digital landscape, Verisure is keen to remain one step ahead, anticipating challenges and developing cutting-edge solutions to protect and empower its customers. With the advent of faster and more reliable networks, the maturation of cloud technologies, and the emergence of containerization platforms, like Kubernetes, the company recognized the opportunity for transformative change. The Technical Platform team embraced the prospect of replacing its existing monolithic architecture with a more agile and flexible microservices approach.
Experiencing rapid business growth, the company recognized the challenge of manually creating and maintaining multiple Kubernetes clusters while sustaining operational excellence. To meet this challenge head on, the Technical Platform team embraced new ways of working as well as groundbreaking technology trends that would enable them to deliver value to customers in a more agile manner. Containers and orchestrators like Rancher Prime emerged as the missing keys that would unlock Verisure’s ability to expand at pace with market demand.
“We realized the need to elevate our Kubernetes infrastructure and transitioned from the community version of Rancher to Rancher Prime seeking first-class support,” explains Ivan Ramos, IaC Kubernetes team lead at Securitas Direct. “With Rancher Prime, we can ensure the continuous operation of our critical clusters, meet the demands of our business, and empower our team with the optimal tools.”
Embracing the latest technology has always been vital for Verisure, as Ramos points out: “Adopting new technology trends is a real driver for us as a company since innovation is at the core of everything we do. We knew that working closely with Rancher Support would help us speed up our transformation without losing control.”
“Although implementing Rancher with community version and ad hoc processes was feasible for us, we decided to take things to the next level and look for first-class support based on Rancher Prime. That guaranteed that we could keep all the required clusters up and running to support all the necessary loads for our business and to provide our team with the best tools to implement their work.”
Why Rancher Prime?
Verisure embarked on its Rancher journey by exploring the community version, using its own playbooks and tools. It quickly recognized the value of Kubernetes and decided to embrace that technology with the support of a trusted partner like SUSE. Reflecting on its decision, Ramos explains: “Once we made the choice to bring Kubernetes into our operations, we extensively researched supported distributions and compared them against our requirements. SUSE fulfilled all our needs.”
What truly sets Rancher Prime apart for Verisure is not only its outstanding functionality but also its commitment to open standards. Ramos emphasizes: “Rancher has one of the best open source projects, and we truly appreciate SUSE’s commitment to open standards. It makes us feel like we’re using a solution that adds real value, rather than being locked into a vendor.”
Verisure’s migration to Rancher Prime began with the adoption of a single cluster, allowing them to gather invaluable insights and learnings. With the support of SUSE’s team, Verisure completed the initial migration within an impressive timeframe of three months. Encouraged by this success, it swiftly migrated the remaining clusters, completing the process in just six months – a remarkable achievement for the team.
The impact
Unlocking flexibility: building an optimized infrastructure in a hybrid environment
Verisure embarked on a migration journey, seeking a smooth and efficient execution of each cluster migration. Rancher Prime proved to be the best solution, providing robust provisioning capabilities that made the rollout process a breeze. Verisure’s development teams quickly embraced Rancher Prime as an essential part of their workflow, and the solution seamlessly bridged private and public cluster clouds, enabling a unified and cohesive experience. This newfound flexibility empowered Verisure to optimize its infrastructure, regardless of the deployment model, ensuring a streamlined and efficient operation.
Delivering value to customers at lightning speed
The team has integrated microservices into their technology portfolio, carefully considering their applications in new and existing areas. As the initial Rancher adoption project neared completion, Verisure entered a more mature phase, focusing on stress-testing the Rancher solution and maximizing feature adoption. The result? The company gained a faster and more sustainable way to build and scale its infrastructure, meeting the ever-growing demands of their business while ensuring a competitive time-tomarket. “We’re now able to deliver value to our end customers faster, without compromising security or stability,” explains Ramos.
Enhanced visibility and minimized security risks
With Rancher Prime, Verisure now benefits from a template-driven approach to provision new clusters, streamlining the process and ensuring homogeneity across its infrastructure. As Ramos points out, the team can now redirect its attention to other critical aspects of the business: “Management, maintenance and upgrading our experience is now much easier and smoother. We now have a unified approach that was hard to execute before this project, so now we have time to focus on other aspects.”
Moreover, the team has not overlooked the needs of its internal stakeholders —the development teams— who play a pivotal role in its success. With Rancher Prime, Verisure empowers these teams with greater autonomy, allowing them to innovate and confidently create. The centralized user permissions feature adds an extra control layer, minimizing security risks and simplifying policy implementation. Rancher Prime enables the teams to automate processes and applies a consistent set of user access and security policies for all clusters.
Navigating challenges with expert support
Throughout Verisure’s journey with Rancher Prime, SUSE’s support and expertise played a pivotal role in ensuring success and overcoming various challenges. “The support team helped us answer all the doubts related to RKE and RKE2 that came up during migration phases. Apart from that, we also appreciated having access to product teams, which gave us the opportunity to learn more about the Rancher best practices and roadmap,” says Ramos.
The team recognizes that SUSE Support will play a pivotal role in effectively incorporating additional capabilities into its existing ecosystem. It is confident that any challenges that arise will be swiftly tackled with the guidance and expertise of the SUSE Support team, ensuring a seamless integration process.
What’s next for Verisure?
In pursuit of innovation and continuous improvement, two critical areas have captured Verisure’s attention: edge environments, looking at how to apply in current IoT use cases, and container security, since this is a priority for Verisure. As Ramos shares his insights, it becomes evident that Verisure is actively seeking solutions that will propel their business forward and address their evolving needs.