Safeguarding the journey: Bolt protects its super-app with Elastic Security on Elastic Cloud with AWS

Bolt is on a mission to make cities for people, not cars. From fleets of instantly recognizable green electric scooters to car-sharing and food delivery, its numerous alternatives to private cars reduce congestion and air pollution. It is now the largest micromobility operator in Europe, with 260,000 shared vehicles available across 260 cities and 25 countries. It is also expanding operations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

More than 150 million customers use the Bolt app to access services, placing huge demands on the company's IT infrastructure. This includes its security systems that defend against cyber threats ranging from brute force attacks on employee accounts to attempted data exfiltration.

Bolt's rapid expansion into new cities and territories puts additional pressure on the security team. "As the business grows, we need to control and minimize our attack surface," says Iuliia Laaneots, Cybersecurity Engineer, Bolt. "You don't want to spend more time than is absolutely necessary maintaining systems when you could be contributing strategically to organizational security and customer protections."

Until recently Bolt used an open SIEM solution with Elastic at the back end. With the launch of Elastic Security, the company seized the opportunity to streamline and strengthen their security environment. "We're a small team so we need to work as efficiently as possible. A fully native Elastic solution offered cutting-edge SIEM features and a simpler interface," says Laaneots.

Elastic recommended migrating to Elastic Security on Elastic Cloud running on AWS. An early demonstration revealed the potential for Elastic Security to boost the efficiency of the security team.

"Previously I spent more than two days a week just keeping our systems up and running," says Kadir Burak Mavzer, Cyber Security Engineer, Bolt. "Elastic Security simplifies everything. It's easy to set up data ingestion pipelines, and once you enable the rules there is little to do other than act on alerts."

This experience enabled Mavzer to make a successful business case for a full migration, which took just two weeks. Today, the platform ingests data from across the organization's networks, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS tools. This includes Bolt's largest source of data, its identity and access management system. "We now have peace of mind that we won't lose data, while Elastic's prebuilt rules mean we can detect and rapidly investigate suspicious activities across our entire IT estate," says Mavzer.

The Bolt team was impressed by the speed and efficiency of Elastic Security. Mavzer gives the example of retrieving archived data. "In one instance we were able to restore from snapshots, a year's worth of information in just one hour."

Elastic Cloud eliminates most of the challenges associated with scaling complex logging and security environments, but it also offers cost-effective solutions for organizations. According to Laaneots, "With self-hosted deployments, you are always mindful about the costs, the number of instances you need to establish, and so on. But with Elastic Cloud, we can increase capacity with minimal impact on the team."

According to Mavzer, Elastic Security on Elastic Cloud was surprisingly affordable. Despite the number of logs ingested, time saved for engineers, and storage optimization, the pricing scheme was far more reasonable than they anticipated. Plus, they get all the cool security features that come with Elastic.

These testimonials highlight how Elastic Cloud proves to be a highly efficient and cost-effective solution, not only simplifying the scaling process but also providing a range of impressive security features that meet the needs of security-conscious businesses.

Now that they spend less time maintaining their security infrastructure, and the rest of the security team can focus on making a strategic contribution to the business.

Elastic Security on Elastic Cloud guarantees the ingestion and availability of logging data. "As a security engineer you're always anxious about losing logs and data. With Elastic Security, those worries go away," says Laaneots.

Bolt achieves improved visibility across their environment with Elastic Security. "We collect all relevant data, monitor key issues from Kibana dashboards, and view incident investigations," says Mavzer.

Mavzer expects Elastic machine learning to play a greater role in Bolt's security environment based on early trials of the technology. "We discovered spikes in authentication attempts that we hadn't seen before. Even though they weren't the result of malicious activity, we see how Elastic machine learning helps pinpoint abnormal behavior with even greater accuracy."

Bolt is an Elastic Design Partner, providing feedback to the Elastic team and helping to shape the Elastic Security roadmap. "It is super-important that we have a security partner who listens," says Laaneots. "In recent months, we've had very productive conversations with Elastic, including with the cloud security posture management (CSPM) team. They were extremely responsive to our feedback," she says.

As more cities put micromobility at the heart of their transport and sustainability strategies, Bolt is ideally positioned to meet the needs of a fast-growing international audience.

"Bolt takes immense pride in the user experience, and we see something similar in Elastic," says Mavzer. "For such an advanced SIEM, it is incredibly convenient. You don't have to break a sweat trying to find this interface or that button—everything is logical and obvious. Unlike many security solutions that I've used in the past, Elastic Security is a pleasure to use."