How Weborama migrated their Russian users' data to Yandex Cloud

The data company Weborama moved their customer data to the scalable Yandex Object Storage. Yandex Cloud managed services also helped them to deploy the Weborama Campaign Manager (a tool for traffic verification) and Weborama Audience Manager (a DMP platform for data processing).

By migrating to a Russian cloud platform, the company was able to quickly and easily meet the requirements of Russian personal data protection regulations while also freeing up time to develop new tools, all without increasing their DevOps staff.

Headquartered in France, Weborama is a global independent data company and a world leader in audience data management. The company specializes in the development and implementation of technological solutions based on audience data processing aimed at improving marketing KPIs and boosting adveritising cost-efficiency. The company leverages an extensive stack of its own technologies and resources, including:

• A CDP/DMP solution (Weborama Audience Manager).
• An audience profile database (BigSea).
• Semantic text data analysis tools to research online audiences (BigFish), build custom audience segments (MoonFish), and enable contextual targeting (GoldenFish).
• Tools to measure and audit advertising campaigns (Weborama Campaign Manager).

The company has been on the Russian market since 2012, partnering with leading advertisers, major communication groups, and platforms. Previously, the company had stored all its customers' hashed data, including that of Russian users, on its own servers in France.

2015 saw the adoption of changes to Russian Federal Law № 152, which mandated that Russian citizens' personal data be hosted on servers in data centers located in Russia. To comply with the requirements of this law, Weborama needed to find a partner to help migrate their Russian users' data. Weborama needed an SLA that guaranteed that stable availability — runtime problems or faults could result in major fines, decreased revenues, and loss of confidence in the eyes of customers. Some services are so sensitive to delays that even a minute of downtime could be critical for the company.

From traffic verifier to cloud migration

At that time, Weborama already had experience with Yandex, as one of the companies involved in the verification of traffic quality in the Yandex Direct advertising platform. The company decided to expand their cooperation and opted to migrating to Yandex Cloud.

In addition to a large number of tightly integrated platform services that can be used to create new Weborama services, the Yandex Cloud platform has certification that its Personal Data Information System (PDIS) complies with requirements for information and personal data security. The certificate confirms that the cloud platform fully meets all requirements of Law № 152, Government Decree No. 1119, and FSTEC Order No. 21, providing the highest possible level of security for the personal data processed.

The main goal was to migrate Weborama’s data and services from its own servers in France to the cloud platform. Together with Yandex Cloud consultants, they developed a migration algorithm in which each iteration was tested first and then deployed. This helped make migration to the new infrastructure as smooth as possible, avoiding data losses and disruptions.

Weborama used Yandex Compute Cloud VMs to launch the RabbitMQ message broker and the Prometheus monitoring system. The data was hosted in the universal, scalable, S3-compatible, cloud-based Yandex Object Storage, with Yandex Managed Service for Redis managing the Redis DBMS. Yandex Managed Service for Kubernetes takes care of cluster creation and management, while Yandex Network Load Balancer does just what its name implies.

Weborama set and successfully stuck to a tight schedule for migrating to the new infrastructure. Now Russian customers' data is stored in Yandex data centers in Russia, and data storage is automatically scaled to accommodate any amount of data uploaded. The cloud infrastructure also helped Weborama to deploy, in just six months, a tool for traffic verification (Weborama Campaign Manager) and a DMP platform to process data from the Weborama Audience Manager on Russian servers. The company relied on extensive advice from Yandex engineers to help minimize any complications.

By migrating their data and services to Yandex Cloud, Weborama were able to quickly and fully comply with Russian legal requirements and create new cloud-based products with a focus on scalability and flexibility.

Weborama was pleased that Yandex Cloud took all necessary steps to ensure that the personal data of Russian citizens were protected. The next step in their cloud adoption is to increase the amount of resources utilized.