Freestar Moves Faster and Innovates With a SADA Security Roadmap

Helping digital publishers maximize their revenue

Freestar helps digital publishers maximize their revenue in the fast-moving AdTech industry. Building upon an already robust security foundation, Freestar’s technical team wanted an expert partner to verify its approach and find new ways to proactively stay ahead of the evolving digital threat landscape while speeding up innovation.

Business challenge

As a leading ad monetization partner for digital publishers, Freestar helps a wide array of clients, from mid-sized niche content creators to some of the world’s largest enterprise publishers, maximize their digital revenue. Freestar’s rapid growth, coupled with a commitment to serving high-profile clients, prompted its leadership team to proactively validate and enhance its security framework, ensuring it continued to meet the highest standards.

“We have a commitment to our publishers to provide the best possible service, and that includes the security of their data,” says Humberto Somensi, vice president of architecture at Freestar. “We wanted to verify our security posture with a trusted third party, so we could understand the evolving threat landscape and confirm our roadmap.”

With workloads running on Google Cloud and a culture of agile development, Freestar’s team needed to be sure its security practices could keep up with innovation. The team was confident in its foundational security, but recognized the need for an external perspective to identify any potential opportunities and to ensure its architecture was aligned with modern security best practices.

Solution

Freestar teamed up with SADA, An Insight company, and multiple-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year. Building on the years-long cloud hosting partnership between the companies, Freestar wanted to work with SADA based on their proven expertise in Google Cloud security to conduct a Cloud Security Confidence Assessment. The goal was to find security improvements and deepen the relationship to help Freestar’s team enhance its security skills. SADA’s approach was exacting and tailored to Freestar’s specific environment. The solution included:

• Cloud Security Confidence Assessment framework: SADA used a structured framework to evaluate Freestar’s security posture across key domains, including Identity and Access Management (IAM), network security, data protection, and logging.
• Human-led threat hunting: To complement the coverage of automated security tools, SADA’s experts performed a human-led review of Freestar’s activity logs and configurations. This let them uncover subtle patterns and potential threats that might have been missed by automated scans.
• Structured workshops and knowledge transfer: The assessment involved a series of domain-specific workshops with Freestar’s engineering teams. This collaborative approach helped the deep knowledge exchange between SADA and Freestar, ensuring the SADA team understood the unique nuances of the Freestar business and the Freestar team understood the “why” behind every SADA recommendation.
• Detailed remediation roadmap: The final deliverable included a comprehensive report with an executive summary, quick-win remediations, and a long-term strategic roadmap. This gave Freestar peace of mind that its current security posture was in a good place, along with a clear, prioritized path forward to further its security initiatives. “We know there are always some security risks in every platform and we wanted to be proactive in identifying them,” says Horacio Encina, staff DevOps engineer at Freestar. “SADA’s Cloud Security Confidence Assessment helped assess where the security risks could be and how to prioritize and address them before they ever actually become a real problem.”

Having a conversation about security

While some security consultants only provide template security reports based on a predictable, repeatable model, SADA uses a consistent framework and then applies intuition, creativity, and deep contextual insight, which are harder to standardize. This lets SADA tailor their approach on a customer-by-customer basis, making it feel more like a conversation about security than an assessment. It also ensures that the output of the assessment is specific to individual customer needs.

“SADA’s approach was very well reasoned from the beginning,” says Somensi. “The Cloud Confidence Score gives Freestar a clear, more quantifiable measure of our security posture. Human analysis also helped us have in-depth discussions about the reasons why we do some things a certain way, which added a lot of value—that’s SADA’s secret sauce, which made the assessment a success.”

Impact

The collaboration delivered immediate and tangible benefits, strengthening Freestar’s security posture and providing even greater assurance to its publisher partners.

Quantifiable benefits

• Improved access control: Freestar adopted a new infrastructure-as-code model for IAM permissions, replacing manual changes with an auditable and reviewable process using GitOps. This directly mitigated a significant access control risk.
• Proactive modernization: By optimizing and modernizing legacy configurations, the Freestar team further reduced its attack surface, neutralizing potential threats and reinforcing the platform’s integrity.
• Data-driven decision making: The assessment results gave Freestar a benchmark to measure its security posture against, verifying its existing strengths and providing data to prioritize future security investments.

Qualitative improvements

• Boosted confidence: The external security verification and above-average industry security ranking that SADA gave Freestar raised its leadership and engineering teams’ confidence in its security posture to an even higher level, which is crucial for supporting and protecting its high-value clients.
• Increased agility: By embedding security practices directly into the development lifecycle, Freestar engineers now view security as a way to unlock faster, more confident innovation.
• More collaboration: The open and clear communication between SADA and Freestar created a stronger internal culture around security, making sure it stays a top priority for all teams.

“The results speak for themselves,” says Jared Canova, executive vice president of product and engineering at Freestar. “The security recommendations were very actionable, and we’re moving forward faster than we would have without SADA. That’s why we continue to partner with SADA on more initiatives.”

Future outlook

Building on the solid foundation established by the Cloud Security Confidence Assessment, Freestar is better positioned to build on its already strong security posture. The company will keep using SADA’s strategic roadmap to guide its security investments and keep security at the core of its continuous improvement cycle. This sets Freestar up not only to protect its partners but also help set the standard for security throughout the AdTech ecosystem.

“Having security embedded in the process and continuing to internalize it within our engineering practices only helps our agility,” says Somensi. “That’s our goal: let our engineers keep building and giving best-in-class services to our publishers. A key to that is making security Freestar’s job zero.”