Swiss FinTech reduces the effort for IT monitoring
Altoo ensures the best availability and fulfills the highest security standards for its IT infrastructure without the need for additional staff thanks to Checkmk.
Who is Altoo?
Altoo brings wealth management services into the digital age. The company offers an online service for managing the most important and complex aspects of your wealth in the simplest way. Over a short period of time, Altoo has been able to acquire customers worldwide. Its offering is aimed primarily at wealthy individuals who want transparency and control over their entire wealth structure. Altoo offers the high-security standards of a Swiss FinTech company, while at the same time through its unique technology providing an optimal user experience for its customers.
I am really happy to have been working with Checkmk for several years. I am especially pleased that the manual and the engagement with the community are constantly being expanded.
Altoo was looking for an IT monitoring solution that was easy to implement. At the same time, the tool had to meet the security standards of a FinTech company. In addition, the work involved in the monitoring process had to be kept to a minimum.
The decision was made for Checkmk. Since 2019 the company has been using the Checkmk Enterprise Edition. Altoo monitors the IT infrastructure in its data center and in its offices, each with an independent Checkmk instance.
The company is expanding and the IT monitoring must be able to grow with it as required. With Checkmk, neither the hardware requirements nor the personnel resources needed become a bottleneck for its IT operations.
Wealth management made easy
The economic effects of the coronavirus are just one example of the global shocks that repeatedly lead to fluctuations on the international financial markets. Investors are therefore looking for ways to monitor the development of their assets at all times and, if necessary, to have the right decision-making tools quickly and easily at their disposal.
This is precisely why wealthy private individuals and family businesses rely on Altoo to manage their assets more easily. With the FinTech company’s platform, users have access to all information about their assets at all times, regardless of their asset structure or location. Altoo uses its experience in the areas of wealth management, software development, and IT operations to provide an intuitive online service that also meets the highest security standards. The company has been growing since its foundation at the end of 2017, and it has already attracted numerous customers.
High availability of the IT infrastructure is crucial for both the customer experience and the employees. To ensure this, Altoo must monitor numerous IT resources.
The challenge
Altoo has built a modern IT infrastructure in a short period of time and has to follow high-security standards. The IT operations team was looking for a way to monitor all IT assets centrally with minimum personal resources. Evaluation, implementation, and operation of this monitoring must be manageable with a minimum of time and effort. Furthermore, the monitoring has to be able to verify that the certificates being used are not outdated.
Lightweight, scalable and reliable
Only with the use of suitable monitoring can the company avoid problems, or at least identify them early. To this end, the company was looking for an IT monitoring solution for the systems in its data center (DC), and in its company offices.
Altoo has high demands for reliability, but at the same time cannot place an additional burden on the IT operations team. In mid‑2019, Altoo decided to deploy the Checkmk Enterprise Edition. The decision was made to use Checkmk because it is easy to use, provides detailed information and can be easily extended. The ease of use of Checkmk and its flexible alerting capabilities mean that Altoo does not need to assign a dedicated staff member just for IT monitoring. The responsibility for IT monitoring can be shouldered within the team.
Altoo expects its IT infrastructure to grow in the future and is convinced that Checkmk will scale easily. With its low resource requirements and a growing range of integrations, any changes to the IT infrastructure in the years ahead can be easily implemented as required.
The solution
Altoo recognized that Checkmk would best fit their requirement profile. After internal consultation, they successfully introduced Checkmk in 2020, and have been monitoring their entire IT infrastructure with Checkmk ever since.
Checkmk as partner for the future
Altoo's IT monitoring currently includes about 100 systems in two separate Checkmk instances. The first Checkmk instance is responsible for the systems in the data center, including all VPN tunnels, while the second instance keeps an eye on the IT infrastructure in the office environments. The data center instance runs on a virtual machine, and the office instance runs on a physical appliance.
Altoo monitors Linux and Windows devices via Checkmk agents, and network components via the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Management is simple and straightforward, and Altoo distributes the Checkmk agents through its own repositories, or uses Ansible to roll them out to the systems.
The advantages
Thanks to Checkmk Altoo can always assure high availability of its online services. The constantly growing user base does not affect the service quality, because Altoo can react in time, and can make precise decisions for the management of its IT resources. Issues can be mitigated before they affect the customer experience.
Agile and secure at the same time
Altoo currently uses Checkmk only in the area of IT operations. The development team is working with a monitoring solution based on Prometheus, so there is a possibility that the integration of Checkmk and Prometheus will be used in the future. New customer requirements will certainly also have an impact on the IT infrastructure and its monitoring. However, Altoo is confident that Checkmk can easily accommodate new requirements.
For Altoo, data protection is a top priority due to its demanding customer segment. In Switzerland alone, Altoo is in daily contact with over 40 banks. Checkmk provides the necessary security and operates with complete transparency. In addition, IT operations can guarantee that no sensitive data is exposed by the monitoring and that customer data is never endangered by the use of Checkmk.
Altoo offers the proven security of a Swiss FinTech, tailored to the age of digitalisation in a single software platform. Word of its potential has spread quickly, and today Altoo has customers in Germany, the UK, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Precisely because of its success, Altoo has to keep a constant eye on its IT infrastructure and ensure that all systems are fully scalable – including the monitoring of these systems. With Checkmk, Altoo has found the optimal solution for monitoring its IT infrastructure.
I can only advise everyone to try Checkmk at least once. The operation is really simple.
