3rd Man - The genuine article

Card fraud is in the news on a daily basis. In the first six months of 2007 the UK's payment association APACS reported that card not present fraud increased by 44% to £137 million. This bankreported loss is only the tip of an ever growing iceberg which is set to wreck companies' profitability and ruin the reputations of otherwise responsible traders.

Download as PDF

The 3rd Man is Europe's leading specialist Card Not Present (CNP) Fraud Screening Company. Its business is to prevent online fraud by effectively screening the many elements of a transaction which in turn enables them accurately to detect fraud. Upon detection, The 3rd Man alerts its customers who prevent fulfilment and therefore remove the reward from fraudsters.

The Challenges

The 3rd Man has grown explosively over the last 24 months and continues to deal with ever-increasing volumes of data processing requests. As the business has expanded, The 3rd Man's data processing needs have increased. In line with the industry data security standards, all data processing must remain secure and compliant at all times.

Our growing customer base is continually increasing business and so we have an ongoing need to expand our technical capability and capacity, Our priorities remain to provide the highest levels of quality whilst maintaining security and building in resilience and fault tolerance throughout our network architecture. Steve Tyas, Operations Director at The 3rd Man

The Solutions

To meet the particular needs of The 3rd Man, Claranet designed, implemented and managed an individually tailored, fully redundant managed hosting platform which addressed the key areas of network resilience, capacity and security, while remaining fully scalable to meet the company's projected growth.

We built the new network in two parts: first, a primary site with high availability, best-of-breed hardware, including dual firewalls and multiple HP servers to eliminate potential single points of failure. Dual Foundry load balancers were installed to ensure that incoming traffic is handled in the most efficient way, by routing all traffic to an available server. To make the network as secure as possible we included Juniper Networks Netscreen firewalls coupled with a High Availability demarcation zone (DMZ).

The Result

The infrastructure provided by Claranet has been instrumental in The 3rd Man's ability to support their extraordinary growth over the last two years. The company now hosts SuperSearch, the National CNP Fraud File which enables retailers to share data with security and anonymity to help in combating fraud. The sheer size of this database demands an IT infrastructure that ensures the highest levels of availability, capacity and resilience.