Case Study: IST Research achieves scalable, real-time humanitarian intelligence with Elastic

IST Research uses Elastic Stack to aid humanitarian efforts globally

IST Research is a human-security technology firm that builds the Pulse platform to detect and analyze threats like human trafficking, violent extremism, and child-soldier recruitment. Faced with rapidly growing data — individual production instances generate 500 GB–1 TB of application data and over 100 million logs per day, roughly three times the scale since 2017 — the team needed a more scalable, manageable architecture to support diverse customer use cases and global analyst workflows.

IST moved completely to Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud and re-architected Pulse with specialized, segmented clusters (Percolator, Pelias, and tuned data clusters with cross-cluster search), Logstash everywhere plus a dedicated high-throughput logging cluster, multi-instance Kibana (migrating to Spaces), and Elastic Maps integration. The new design reduced operational burden, enabled per-cluster tuning for performance and retention, supported cross-cluster analysis at scale, and improved analyst visibility and user experience across their global humanitarian operations.

IST Research