Elastic provides enhanced security with Azure Private Link

With a growing customer base that has ever-evolving regulatory needs, Elastic wanted to satisfy the demand for a private connection to cloud endpoints that can provide better network security control around authorization and access. Azure Private Link presented the company with an opportunity to bridge this gap and meet the latest stringent security and compliance regulations faced by enterprises big and small. Private Link offers a secure connection to a private IP address in the customer network, ensuring that traffic between service providers and the customer always stays on the Azure backbone. This process is critical to help prevent security breaches and streamline data retrieval, ingestion, and storage from any source.

“Azure Private Link is essential for customers who want to lock down access to their deployments and secure the data that’s transferred between their applications on Azure and Elastic Cloud,” says Shubha Anjur Tupil, a Product Manager at Elastic who is responsible for all Private Link integrations. “Our customers want to make their data accessible only by authorized actors and do it in a way that is easy to configure and use, cost-effective, and can get them started quickly, so Azure Private Link is a big part of the security story for Elastic Cloud.”

By delivering its services over Private Link, Elastic customers now enjoy the benefits of Azure while consuming all Elastic has to offer using a private IP address within their own network. In turn, customers can further safeguard privacy and security and run how and where they want with an improved ability to find documents, monitor apps, and infrastructure, extend overall visibility into cloud-native services, and more.

Offering security enhancements and data protection with less onboarding

Elastic and its customers required a highly secure and scalable way of creating, sharing, and connecting data in the cloud. By using Private Link, Elastic is now able to support critical customer workloads with Azure and deliver enhanced security and data protection with less onboarding effort thanks to a simplified cloud network architecture and private connectivity between Azure virtual networks and Elastic Cloud deployments. “The data that customers put into the cloud can be limited by the absence of certain controls and configurations like what they would get from Private Link,” explains Uri Cohen, Vice President of Product Management at Elastic. “After they’re on our platform, they can lock a ton of value into their data, including an enhanced security posture.”

When a service provider such as Elastic and a customer connect over Private Link, the traffic never traverses a public network like the internet, increasing network traffic security and ensuring there’s no cross-connectivity. Because Private Link routes data to private, back-end Azure service endpoints, providers can deliver services in their own virtual networks, and customers can then access those services seamlessly via a private endpoint in their local virtual networks. Customers can also take advantage of the global reach of Private Link to connect privately and in a highly secure manner to services that are running in other regions around the world. “At any time, we can quickly identify customers’ needs and show them how easy it is to use Private Link to lock down traffic originating from their virtual networks into their Elastic Cloud deployments,” says Cohen.

Elastic was an early adopter of Private Link for its hosted and managed offerings. Although initial uptake was high with customers in tightly regulated industries like banking, healthcare, and education, current data from the company shows that Private Link is broadly used by customers of all sizes and at various stages in their cloud journeys. “Before we had Azure Private Link, it was one of the top five asks from our customers who wanted to move their workloads to the cloud from self-managed environments,” says Anjur Tupil. “We simply couldn’t provide this level of service and security to our customers without it.”

Joining forces to deliver the solution in a remarkably brief timespan

Prior to deploying Private Link, Elastic had discussions with the Microsoft networking team and was assigned a technical account manager to help connect with the right Microsoft resources over the course of this project. That level of hand-in-hand support coupled with the service’s ease of use led to an extremely successful integration—Private Link is now one of the few services that customers request by name. “Because of our multitenant deployment model, Private Link is the best way for us to deliver the security and privacy controls that customers want,” says Anjur Tupil. “Private Link is also superior to virtual network peering because it’s a unidirectional connection from the consumer to the producer and therefore more secure.”

Elastic is continuing to evaluate other complementary products and resources in Azure, including using Azure Cosmos DB to refresh one of its internal key-value data stores and setting up a high-performance, ultra-low latency Azure Load Balancer to distribute traffic to back-end virtual machines. Using Azure is also aligned with Elastic’s cloud-agnostic approach for its customers. “One of our major sales promises to customers is that you don’t have to lock yourself into any particular cloud provider and can have access to any and all workloads across multiple cloud providers, so you choose whatever works best for you,” explains Anjur Tupil.

Enjoying reliable performance and appealing to security-conscious customers

Elastic made Private Link available to all of its customers in July 2021 and has received few support requests to date, reinforcing its reliable performance and positioning it as a key part of Elastic’s strategic puzzle. “We’re not only concerned with the number of customers who are using Private Link, but we want to ensure that growth is steady,” remarks Cohen. “We’re at nearly 100 percent growth in adoption over the last few months—some of that’s completely frictionless, which is a big part of our value proposition. You don’t have to contact us to learn how to secure your data because it’s quick and easy to do through our cloud console using Private Link.”

With Private Link now fully deployed, Elastic is offering new and existing security-conscious customers increased security, privacy, and data protection and unlocking more value from the cloud. “Migration of self-managed workloads to the cloud is much easier because you have similar control in the cloud environment as you do on-premises,” explains Anjur Tupil. Adds Cohen, “We have new customers that we wouldn’t have signed if not for the availability of the Private Link integration and the ease of our expansion journey for them to be able to move forward and grow alongside us.”

Looking ahead, Elastic hopes to build on its early success with Private Link and continue expanding on various features. Says Anjur Tupil, “We want to work closely with our three main cloud providers, including Azure, on keeping current with the Private Link road map because our customers are asking us for features that we hope to continue delivering for a premium Elastic experience.”
 

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