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Customer story

LexisNexis Risk Solutions enables fraud prevention via decision analytics

About LexisNexis

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

Challenge

Deliver real time risk decisions at global scale and speed

LexisNexis Risk Solutions, formerly ThreatMetrix, gives customers the ability to support better end customer experience 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:

  • Handles over 130 million real time transactions across 40,000 websites to quickly determine which requests are legitimate customers versus cyber threats.

  • Processes two billion API transactions per month, from 4.5 billion active devices.

  • Performs calculations that include anonymized device profiling, smart rules, smart learning, and data from hundreds of properties stored in the data warehouse.

  • Returns hundreds of attributes that inform the customer whether the request is a cyberthreat or a valued customer in less than 100 milliseconds.

As global digital transformations accelerate and the volume of transaction requests, connected devices, and online activity grows, LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ transaction capabilities and performance must stay predictable. Their original solution - Cassandra - required too many nodes and too much overhead to gain desired performance, especially as traffic and data volumes scaled up.

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Scaling for large amounts of data

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

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Predictable performance with heavy mixed workloads

Required full access to entire dataset while handling millions and reads and writes per second

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Scale real-time business decisions

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

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Easy to administer and operate

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

Solution

Reduce fraud while delivering accurate, frictionless transactions with Aerospike

With Aerospike, LexisNexis Risk Solutions eliminates the risk that they experienced with Cassandra of unknown costs associated with uncontrolled scale. Aerospike provides absolutely predictable sub-millisecond latency performance despite dramatically increased volumes of request, 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 cyber threats.

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Low latency global replication

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

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Improved manageability

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

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Reduced average request latency

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

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Scale high performance with bright heavy workloads

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

Results

Achieving scale while saving costs and delivering predictable performance

When LexisNexis Risk Solutions hit performance and scaling challenges with 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

Aerospike expertise and support provided accurate specifications and sizing that met performance and growth requirements.