MyHeritage: Preserving Family History

The Challenge

MyHeritage employs 420 people who work in Israel, North America and Europe. Nearly 100 people in sales and support needed access to applications and data stored on the company’s two data centers: one in the U.S. and one in Israel.

The company was looking for a solution that would provide secure, reliable connectivity to data centers for the sales and support team while reducing IT overhead.

Key employee challenges were:

• Multiple data centers: Employees everywhere needed access to both data centers.
• Multiple VPN solutions: Employees often had to connect via VPN to one data center and then disconnect and connect to the other to get needed information.
• Slow and unreliable: Employees faced delays and frustration due to common ISP disruptions. VPNs were slow, and OS updates often caused the client to stop working properly.

The IT team had challenges of their own.

• Security vulnerabilities: Users had access to entire subnets via the VPN, rather than only the specific applications they needed.
• Help desk overhead: Issues with the VPN client, slow connectivity and internet-related issues resulted in a large volume of help desk calls.
• Management overhead: Each member of the sales or support team had at least one device with a VPN client that required installation and maintenance by the overburdened IT team.

The Solution

“... the Meta solution is much simpler and more convenient for our IT team and our users.”
- Moshe Magal, IT team leader

Leveraging a cloud-native global backbone, Proofpoint Meta provides MyHeritage with the high-performance, anytime/anywhere connectivity needed to run their business. MyHeritage benefits from full auditing and visibility over all network traffic for full control over their sensitive data. With the first stages under way, Meta has laid the groundwork to scale out and up as needed. The next stage is the development teams, and, from there, the sky’s the limit.

• Data center: MetaPort, a lightweight gateway to Proofpoint Meta, replaced the Fortigate VPN and OpenVPN setup in each MyHeritage data center.
• Users: Users with managed corporate devices were onboarded with a single Meta client, which they use to access Proofpoint Meta. Users with unmanaged devices were provided with secure remote access via their browser, so there was nothing to install.
• Secure Access: From Proofpoint Meta, users can access any applications that they are authorized to use without having to know where the applications are located or having to connect/disconnect VPN clients.