Case Study: Synacor achieves 90% faster hosted-email deployments and 50% lower security costs with Fortinet FortiGate VM

Secure OCI Environment Brings Big Efficiency to Outsourced Email Service

Synacor, a New York–based technology provider that hosts Zimbra email and collaboration services for ISPs and enterprises, decided to move its hosted-email platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to reduce costs and speed customer onboarding. The company’s challenge was ensuring cloud security and visibility equivalent to its five on‑premises data centers to meet strict SLAs, protect client mailboxes from threats (including DDoS and intrusion attempts), and satisfy compliance requirements.

Synacor ran a proof of concept and deployed Fortinet solutions—FortiGate VM, FortiGuard AI, and FortiAnalyzer—integrated with OCI and its SIEM, enabling cloud-grade firewalling, IPS/IDS, and centralized logging. The move cut onboarding time by 90%, reduced staff deployment and renewal effort by about 30%, halved security costs versus comparable data‑center setups, and allowed rapid, secure test environments and stronger compliance posture, giving Synacor a clear competitive advantage.

Synacor

Ian Mitchell

Executive Director, Technical Operations