Windows Azure: Interview with Privacycentral founder, CEO Zoiner Tejada

As part of the real World Windows Azure Blog series, I contacted Privacycentral founder, CEO Zoiner Tejada, to find out how the company uses Windows Azure platform and Ruby language to build its powerful online privacy services. Click here to learn about Privacycentral's success stories. Let's look at Mr. Tejada's point of view.

Himanshu Kumar Singh (hereinafter referred to as HKS): please brief your website.

Zoiner Tejada (ZT): I created privacycentral in early 2011 to help people protect themselves from internet threats such as cyber-harassment, cyber-fraud and identity theft. We call ourselves the identity Theft Protection version 2.0. Most similar identity-theft services look more like insurance-they only make up for later. And we want to protect people from the threat of identity theft in the first time.

How does hks:privacycentral locate cyber crime and personal information theft?

ZT: Many people's personally identifiable information (PII), such as address, date of birth, and even the mother's maiden name, are exposed to the network. Identity thieves and other cyber criminals use this information to access bank accounts or other confidential resources. I want to propose a browser-based service similar to the PII search engine. When users enter the type of information they want to protect, privacycentral searches for and reports where the user's information is exposed. The service needs to be strong enough to provide users with highly matched, real-time, accurate, and complete results.

HKS: Does the scale of the threat affect the way you develop services?

ZT: Yes, I would like to release this service as soon as possible, and provide technical support to meet the needs of one user at a time, to meet the needs of the enterprise partners with tens of thousands of users. We have only four developers, who should have spent 150,000 of dollars and spent months configuring the server (not counting the cost of writing code), but we should have been busy building and running our services. We know that we need cloud technology to support our online services, so we've evaluated several cloud systems, including Amazon, Google, and Windows Azure. We finally chose Windows Azure because it seamlessly docking with Microsoft technologies such as the. NET Framework, the Visual Studio development platform, and the open Source development language We plan to adopt, such as Ruby.

HKS: What are the advantages of adopting a Ruby language?

ZT: We want to use the pre built Ruby network searcher to support the search function of the website. It was found in the test that we could easily run Ruby in Windows Azure's web role. And since we can use Ruby in Windows Azure, we don't have to write our own web search engine, which dramatically increases our development speed.

HKS: When did you release the service?

ZT: We released the privacycentral.com in July 2011. The website provides customers with online privacy tools, but it was originally a model for large financial institutions and identity-theft enterprises, which provide privacycentral services through his own brand. Our revenue is based on the number of partner Privacycentral customers.

HKS: Please explain how privacycentral.com uses Windows Azure.

ZT:PrivacyCentral.com runs on Windows Azure Web roles that can host Web sites, User Services, and web search capabilities. The web search engine runs in an independent web role instance to extend the independence of the site. When a privacycentral.com user makes a search request, Windows Azure executes a ruby Web search and stores the results in a Windows azure table. We can use Windows Azure SQL database services to manage accounts, charts, and other user data.

What are the advantages of hks:privacycentral using Windows Azure?

ZT: We have witnessed countless advantages. First, with Windows Azure and ruby, we can focus on building our services rather than managing servers and writing extra code. We've been saving privacycentral for three months, and for three months we've talked to our customers, developed our marketing strategies, and started creating value.

Second, by using Windows Azure to support our services, we have saved at least 150,000 dollars in infrastructure investments. If we adopt a non cloud environment, we would have spent a large amount of direct investment to validate our first prototype. Lower entry costs are a powerful reason to adopt Windows Azure.

Once again, by using Windows Azure to optimize privacycentral performance, we can reduce our own costs and provide competitive terms to corporate users. When we add more Web searchers, we can provide three times times the search speed to end users at the same cost.

Hks:windows Azure bring you the extensibility you want?

ZT: Yes, without the unnecessary investment, and with the flexibility of Windows Azure scaling up, we are able to focus on the business plan of our business customers and quickly publish our customer sites. At the beginning of 2012, we had reached a preliminary agreement with a large identity burglar service provider to the major financial institutions and retailers with millions of customers. With Windows Azure, we can confidently promise a potential partner that we can accommodate 300,000 (or 1 million) new customers. If we had adopted a non cloud environment, we would not have been able to develop along the existing path.