About Forter
Forter has revolutionized fraud detection and prevention in the e-commerce industry by replacing the traditional manual, rules-based fraud prevention process with an AI-powered model. This delivers real-time, fully-automated fraud prevention solutions for online merchants. By harnessing customer intelligence, Forter not only blocks fraudulent transactions with precision but also promotes business growth by approving more transactions and enhancing the customer experience.
Key Results
- Saved Time - Finout can instantly complete the tasks that would take the Forter team days to perform manually.
- Reduced Costs - Offers full visibility into the cloud costs of each component enabling better decision-making leading to spending cuts.
- True Partnership - Support and suggestions are always on-hand from Finout’s dedicated support team.
Forter’s FinOps Challenge
As part of Forter’s day-to-day activities, the company processes thousands of e-commerce transactions generating vast amounts of data that need to be validated, stored and made accessible to its customers. To achieve this, the company relies on a mix of third-party cloud service providers including AWS, Snowflake, and Databricks, among others.
Historically, Forter did not dedicate a team member to the task of keeping track of cloud spend. Because cloud costs were lower when the company was smaller, they were folded into the general expenses and did not receive special attention.
In recent years, the company experienced massive growth, and costs rose accordingly. It became clear that cloud costs were a large budget item and needed to be properly tracked and analyzed in order to curb expenses.
“When the company was smaller, cloud costs and other vendor costs weren’t huge or critical. But, as the company has scaled up massively, so have the costs. At some point, the leadership came to the realization that this is a huge portion of our margin and it’s time to take it seriously.”
Vitaliy Pisarev | Staff Software Engineer
As many companies in similar positions do, the Forter team began investigating their increasing costs in order to determine the biggest cost drivers. What seemed simple at first, quickly became more complex.
“In a multi vendor environment, it is very hard to get a unified view of the entire cost of a certain activity. Each vendor has its own cost report; Fusing all of these and performing attribution is a very complex task ”
Vitaliy Pisarev | Staff Software Engineer
Since each component developed by Forter’s development team can depend on multiple service providers, they recognized the need for a tool that offers full visibility into the total cost of each component they develop.
Why Finout?
“It sounded like it would be easy to create our own tool - just gather the information and create a few dashboards - but it’s a lot more complicated than it seems. Finout solved it for us”
Vitaliy Pisarev | Staff Software Engineer
When management decided it was time to gain a deeper understanding of the costs associated with each component, their initial approach was creating an in-house tool created by one of their data engineers. He built a rudimentary dashboard, but it was not intuitive or easy for non-technical staff to use and was challenging to maintain. This experience made the team realize that developing insightful and valuable visualizations was more complex than they had initially thought.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, the Forter team looked for a third-party solution that would be economically feasible while allowing them to focus on their primary tasks. They found their answer in Finout. Among Finout’s many benefits, the stand-out features for Forter were the MegaBill and Virtual Tagging which gave their staff a precise breakdown of costs per component across all providers.
The Results of Onboarding Finout’s Cloud Observability Platform
Finout provided Forter with a solution that offers complete visibility into all services used by each component, leading to a holistic understanding of each component’s cost footprint. The key features that provided immediate time savings and peace of mind were the following:
- MegaBill - Allowing a centralized view of all cloud expenses across providers, facilitating easy identification of trends and opportunities for spending optimization and cost reduction.
- Virtual Tagging - Enabling real-time, simplified, flexible cost allocation per team, component, provider, etc.
- Customized Dashboards - A fully-customized, granular view of all the data each specific user or team needs.
Finout offers unparalleled flexibility, granting each team with the unique view they need through an intuitive, user-friendly interface. The Forter team is now keen to take this further, exploring additional features within Finout, such as Anomaly Detection, Budgeting, and Forecasting
Regardless the features they choose to implement, the Forter team is confident that the Finout team will support them in every step of the way as they have until now: “The team is very responsive, they are truly superstars.”
