Anaqua strengthens security, boosts performance by migrating its IP platform to Azure

A company can be defined by many things—its branding, market share, and employees. But without securing ownership of intellectual property (IP), a company is little more than a logo and a dream. As a market leader in IP management solutions, Anaqua helps companies maintain those dreams in reality by protecting their most valuable assets. The Boston-based software and services provider is trusted with safeguarding the patents and trademarks for some of the world’s most prominent corporations and law firms.

Having so many influential ideas in one place—or, in this case, one platform—inspires Anaqua to provide both sophisticated capabilities and security. “Our platform is a management tool for the entire innovation life cycle,” says Chief Information Officer Erik Bailey. “It helps people go from thinking of an idea to getting it to where it’s doing something useful. We have workflow engines that can take your idea and route it to the appropriate people who can say, ‘Yes, we can monetize this.’ It then walks you through the whole IP prosecution process.” 

By streamlining IP operations through the entire patent life cycle with process automation and analytics, Anaqua helps clients expand their IP portfolios and make informed business decisions. “Patents are mentioned in the United States Constitution. They’re a fundamental right,” says Bailey. “People innovate because of the protection of patents and trademarks. By facilitating that, we’re facilitating innovation. And by facilitating innovation, we’re making the world a better place.”

Planning for the future

Anaqua found that its ambitions to facilitate innovation required a change in its cloud-hosting model. “We used bare metal servers. You could go to a datacenter and say, ‘This is my database server,’ and touch it. And that worked for us in 2016,” says Bailey. “But by 2021, that model was no longer the right fit for our customers and our hosting team.” Adds Igal Bluvol, Senior Director of Hosting Operations at Anaqua, “We wanted to be able to respond faster if faced with an issue and to have a virtual machine–based platform with strong governance.” The company sought to move to a cloud environment that offered the flexibility, infrastructure, and support to scale globally well into the future. 

The new cloud platform also had to provide exceptional data security and reliability for the clients that trust Anaqua to protect their most prized intellectual possessions. True end-to-end encryption (including within the datacenter itself, with network traffic and native disk encryption), fine-grained control of firewall rules, and streamlined disaster recovery procedures were all key requirements.

Migrating to Azure 

After conducting a year-long, exhaustive, and competitive evaluation to assess its options, Anaqua chose Microsoft Azure as its next-generation cloud platform. With help from Microsoft, Anaqua successfully migrated to an environment where the growing IP solutions company feels highly empowered and comfortable. “Anaqua is ISO certified and SOC 2 Type 2 audited, and so is Microsoft,” notes Bluvol. “The maturity of the governance that we gained with this move was a big factor.”

Anaqua worked with Microsoft on technical, architectural, and financial models. “Our work with the Azure team gave us the confidence that we could make this transformation real, and that gave us confidence to proceed,” says Bailey. The migration, involving almost 400 clients across four product lines in just 22 months, was smooth for both clients and the Anaqua team, finishing four months ahead of schedule in August 2024.

Enhancing security, scalability, and support

Security plays a vital role in the world of IP management. “Fundamentally, we’re selling security, telling our clients, ‘Trust us with your most valuable assets,’” says Bailey. ”Industrial espionage is real and can cause billions of dollars in losses if unchecked. So, we need to make sure that our software package—the application plus the hosting environment and our staff workstations—are all deeply secure.”

To that end, Anaqua significantly enhanced its security posture by deploying multiple advanced technologies, including Azure Application Gateway, which enforces TLS 1.2 and 1.3 for inbound traffic and helps ensure true end-to-end encryption within the Azure datacenter. The company further strengthened security by restricting outbound traffic and only allowing known good endpoints. While Anaqua uses a variety of vendors for its security solutions, Azure serves as the bedrock of the company’s security efforts. “We get a suite of powerful tools from the Azure portal along with assessments from within the environment, greatly improving our monitoring and overall protection,” says Bailey. “We have a concise view of our servers and get reports that flag if anything needs to be tweaked.”

By improving its monitoring, Anaqua can better identify and solve issues to optimize its IP management platform proactively. “We now have a consolidated view of server metrics across the global enterprise using Azure Monitor, enabling identification of performance bottlenecks before they rise to a critical level,” says Bailey. “Virtual machines can easily be resized during a brief maintenance window, which lets us balance cost versus performance without either under- or over-resourcing our servers.”

Having enhanced its security and operational efficiency, Anaqua immediately began to scale its capabilities within Azure. “I found Azure flexible and extremely easy to work with architecturally,” says Jeff Marshall, Director of Hosting Operations at Anaqua. “Building the infrastructure from scratch, tearing it down, and building it up again was effortless.”

Anaqua also takes advantage of in-depth technical support and preventative services from Microsoft Unified with Support for Mission Critical. “The value we get from Microsoft Unified with Support for Mission Critical is immeasurable,” says Bailey. “We not only have a Customer Success Account Manager but also immediate access to an entire team of professionals who know us and our environment. And they have access to the entire Microsoft organization to address all of our questions.”

Impressing clients and improving performance

Anaqua and its clients recognize the impact and potential that comes with this migration. “From identifying that a virtual machine is down to using additional CPU memory, graphs, and charts, we have so much feature richness available to us with Azure and so many more data points than we’ve ever had before,” says Bluvol. “And all the tools now in our back pocket help us demonstrate our increased maturity to existing and prospective clients alike.”

Anaqua’s focus on clients helped spur its migration in the first place. As Bailey explains, “The clients were leading us in this direction, saying, ‘Azure is where we want you to be.’ We heard that strong message from both the corporate and the law firm sides.” And those clients are now experiencing the benefits, with Anaqua exceeding their expectations early on. “When we first started migrating some of our clients to Azure, they were surprised by the performance boost they got,” says Bailey. “We never told them it would be faster. The requirement was that it couldn’t be slower. But it’s faster. In some use cases, in fact, Azure is two to three times faster.”

This increased speed not only helps Anaqua bolster its client relationships, but it also helps those clients streamline their operations. “When our clients say, ‘It’s faster, we haven’t had any downtime, and there haven’t been any outages,’ that makes it exciting for our clients and really worth it for us.” Anaqua realized impressive results from its migration and is now using that momentum to develop new, cutting-edge offerings.

Innovation never ends

Anaqua’s enhanced security, data governance, and performance form the foundation on which it plans to build transformational AI and machine learning capabilities. Having improved its AI readiness by migrating to Azure, the company now aims to evolve its platform even further. For example, its clients and employees now extract useful information far faster from documents using Azure AI Document Intelligence. “We’re providing the mechanics along with the added value of helping patent attorneys and trademark attorneys, including those on our staff, do their jobs more easily,” says Bailey. “We want to guide our users to make the right decisions. They still own the decision, but the more that we can provide guidance, analysis, tools, and synthesized data, the more efficient our clients can be.” Anaqua is currently piloting the use of Microsoft 365 Copilot for additional operational efficiencies, and it will be working with Microsoft to further integrate advanced AI, direct access into Microsoft 365 documents, and other technologies into their products and services.

Anaqua also aims to further enhance its security capabilities by implementing products like Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender. “We’re interested in taking advantage of additional integrated logging and alerting with Microsoft Sentinel and in further protecting our workloads with the Defender suite of tools,” says Bailey. “Knowing we can improve our security and other organizational capabilities incrementally and continually is important to us.”

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