Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, Child Rescue Coalition (CRC) is a global non-profit dedicated to delivering justice for children. The organization builds technology that helps law enforcement identify, apprehend and convict individuals and networks associated with child sexual exploitation. CRC technology solutions, provided free of charge in 106 countries, have directly supported the arrests of over 16,000 predators, safeguarding countless children worldwide.
At-a-Glance
The non-profit organization Child Rescue Coalition struggled to keep up with growing IT demands in a fast-moving world. As an organization relying entirely on donations, cost-effective solutions are paramount. By transitioning from a bare-metal data center architecture to a virtualized and containerized platform with SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Virtualization, the organization gained the agility, availability, lower cost and operational efficiency to pursue justice for children more effectively than ever before.
CRC helps save 1,600+ children with SUSE Rancher Prime
“The tools provided by SUSE have truly revolutionized our daily work. By taking over some of our manual tasks, the automation provided by Rancher Prime makes our four-person team work like a team of twenty-something. Automation is our task force multiplier.”
Simplifying operations with containerization and virtualization
Child Rescue Coalition (CRC) works tirelessly to support law enforcement around the globe in identifying and prosecuting child sexual predators by tracking information online. The organization does this by monitoring the dark web using automated web crawlers that uncover criminal behaviors and harvest data. The data is then analyzed to produce leads and help prosecute possible offenders.
“Our data is so compelling that it stands up to the scrutiny of legal jurisdictions across the world to effectively prosecute and convict offenders without requiring the victim to sit in court and testify — having to relive the atrocities that they have already lived through,” explains Roberto Machorro, Senior Software Developer at CRC.
Prior to SUSE, crawlers were hosted on bare-metal hardware, taking up significant physical space and consuming considerable power. More importantly, the outdated system architecture was unreliable, resulting in poor uptime and high maintenance.
William Wiltse, President of CRC, says: "We had some redundancy in our bare-metal environment, but no full high availability. If a node went down, our services would fail, and the system would degrade unless staff manually intervened.”
With a dedicated but small IT team managing the growing infrastructure, it became increasingly difficult for CRC to keep up with providing effective services to law enforcement. Because CRC’s systems are accessed by law enforcement officers from different time zones, 24/7 availability is critical to the organization. In parallel, as a non-profit, CRC aims to maximize the impact of donated resources. Taking everything into account, the existing infrastructure was becoming unmanageable and inefficient.
To safeguard its fight for justice, CRC turned to virtualization and containerization to more efficiently manage its resources and streamline IT operations.
Why SUSE solutions?
CRC began adopting Kubernetes in 2018, but managing its systems independently became increasingly complex, resulting in downtime and inefficient use of limited resources. Seeking enterprise support for faster issue resolution and guided best practices, CRC discovered SUSE Rancher Prime.
“Kubernetes has a steep learning curve,” says Machorro. “What Rancher Prime provided was ease of use, an easier learning curve and lots of best practices right out of the box. This meant higher availability immediately.”
But this wasn’t the only reason that compelled CRC to work with SUSE. After learning more about the company, CRC found not only a technology partner but also a deep alignment of values. “I believe that SUSE's values align with Child Rescue Coalition's values in that both come from people that want to do good, people that want to work with technology and make it the best technology possible,” says Machorro. “One of the many things I admire about SUSE is that they take ownership and stewardship of open source products. They actually give back to the projects and the community.”
As CRC’s Kubernetes environment expanded over the following years, so did its virtualization needs. While Rancher Prime simplified managing its containerized workloads, CRC’s virtualized environment, powered by VMware, grew increasingly complex to maintain. CRC’s internal teams relied heavily on APIs to manage the virtual infrastructure supporting law enforcement agencies worldwide. As demand grew, the complexity of VMware’s virtualization APIs made efficient infrastructure management increasingly challenging.
Having already experienced significant benefits with Rancher Prime, CRC considered SUSE Virtualization. “One key feature that we considered when evaluating our virtualization solution was the API,” says Machorro. “Many competitors’ APIs are extremely complicated and convoluted. When it comes to SUSE Virtualization, the API is nice, clean and organized. This means less time needed to set up automations and more time tracking predators.”
SUSE’s cloud native solution — SUSE Rancher Suite — was an additional advantage as it includes all of the SUSE Cloud Native portfolio. It consolidated billing and simplified operations with a single vendor relationship. “As a non-profit, we wanted to reduce our operating costs to achieve more with our limited resources,” explains Jose Garcia, Vice President of Technology at CRC. “With SUSE Virtualization, we could significantly lower our license and maintenance costs, so we can better focus on our core mission.”
The impact of SUSE solutions
Modernizes infrastructure, laying a foundation for the future
Using SUSE Rancher Prime, CRC deployed Kubernetes clusters for critical external systems, such as databases accessed by law enforcement, as well as internal systems and development environments. With Rancher Prime, the organization efficiently optimizes hardware resources and automates many manual tasks, significantly freeing up the IT team’s time and resources. Currently, CRC operates with on-premises infrastructure, but Rancher Prime uniquely positions the organization to smoothly adopt cloud or hybrid cloud strategies as its needs evolve.
Reduces costs
SUSE’s bundled solutions — SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Virtualization — simplify licensing, consolidate billing and streamline vendor management. This integrated approach not only reduces administrative complexity but also maximizes CRC’s limited resources, enabling the nonprofit to direct more funding toward mission-critical activities.
“Having a Rancher Prime subscription provides a comprehensive platform with everything you need, which saves us costs and simplifies operations significantly,” says Machorro. “As a nonprofit, this financial efficiency allows us to maximize our resources toward protecting children.”
Strengthens security and simplifies compliance
CRC manages sensitive legal evidence accessed by international agencies, requiring stringent security measures and rigorous compliance standards. Both Rancher Prime and SUSE Virtualization help CRC meet these requirements.
SUSE Rancher Prime includes centralized authentication and role-based access control (RBAC), enabling precise access controls aligned with user roles. SUSE Virtualization offers advanced security mechanisms such as security-attribute-based access control and supports additional protective features like AppArmor to restrict application behavior, further strengthening system integrity.
These security capabilities not only protect CRC's sensitive data but also simplify compliance with international regulations. “Our systems hold critical legal evidence for over a hundred countries,” says Machorro. “SUSE as a known entity and partner makes those security checks and security visits from countries into our offices a whole lot easier.”
Provides 99.99% uptime for web crawlers
CRC’s web crawlers, essential tools for law enforcement, run on virtual machines managed by SUSE Virtualization, ensuring extremely high availability and efficient hardware use. The solution delivers 99.99% uptime, significantly reducing stress on the IT team.
“With SUSE Virtualization, we can relax at night knowing our crawlers won’t require manual restarts or fixes,” Wiltse explains.
SUSE Rancher Prime has also helped CRC eliminate the uptime problems associated with maintaining its dated, manually managed infrastructure. The SUSE solution has enabled the IT team to automate resource management and failover capabilities, meaning that if a node fails for any reason, the risk of service degradation is minimal.
Additionally, Rancher Prime and SUSE Virtualization collaborate to automate rapid failover and recovery. “Within milliseconds, we get alerts if something goes down, but Rancher Prime and SUSE Virtualization are already automatically restarting it,” adds Machorro. “Services come back online without intervention — a massive improvement.”
Enhances scalability through automation
SUSE Virtualization significantly simplifies scaling crawler operations.
“If anything goes wrong, we can take the crawlers down with one command, fix them and redeploy instantly,” explains Machorro. “Dozens and dozens of crawlers, one command. It still amazes me when I think about those walls of servers that we had, and now it’s all sitting in one virtualized environment.”
By running automated monitoring jobs through the intuitive SUSE Virtualization API, the IT team effortlessly manages hundreds of crawlers without additional administrative burden.
Boosts productivity by 5x
By automating many routine tasks through Rancher Prime, CRC is achieving significant productivity gains.
“The tools provided by SUSE have truly revolutionized our daily work,” says Machorro. “By taking over some of our manual tasks, the automation provided by Rancher Prime makes our four-person team work like a team of twenty-something. Automation is our task force multiplier.”
Empowers innovation and expanded mission impact
“By leveraging DevOps, declarative configurations and self-healing features of Rancher Prime and Kubernetes, we have boosted our availability, while requiring much fewer resources than before,” says Wiltse. “With Rancher Prime and our existing, highly-skilled IT team, we managed to substantially expand our tech stack and our capabilities.”
The efficiencies created by SUSE technologies allow CRC to dedicate more resources to expanding its mission beyond technology. While continuing its core operations of identifying predators online, the organization now invests in educational initiatives for parents and children, teaching internet safety, and partners with universities on mental health research.
“Less time managing IT means more time innovating and broadening our impact globally,” Machorro explains.
Supports lean IT team with expert assistance
With SUSE Support providing timely expert assistance, CRC has been able to adopt containerization technology quickly and smoothly.
“SUSE Support has smoothed out our containerization learning curve,” says Machorro. “The reality is, without the support, we would probably not be using Kubernetes at all.”
In parallel, SUSE Support helps the organization make the most of SUSE solutions.
“It isn’t just the SUSE products that help us,” explains Machorro. “It’s the true partnership. It’s the responsive support. Every time we’ve had a problem, they’ve stuck with us until the solution was found, and they always put a lot of effort into listening to our needs.”
What’s next for CRC?
Looking to the future, CRC will continue to grow its SUSE technology stack. For example, with SUSE Security, the organization will be able to support more robust security measures for the sensitive data and evidence that it stores.
Currently, CRC is particularly looking forward to completing its deployment of SUSE Observability to enable more in-depth and intelligent monitoring of its Rancher Prime environment, supporting greater agility and even better allocation of resources.
“We’re excited to have full control over our processes, workloads and data,” concludes Machorro. “SUSE Observability will allow us to better understand our workloads. This directly impacts our efficiency and how we serve children from around the world.”