VGS Engineering Blog

The latest updates from our developer community

February 16, 2022

Using gRPC and WASM to Transform Data Inside Envoy Proxy

Envoy is a powerful open-source modern HTTP proxy server. It doesn't just serve as a proxy; it’s also a swiss army knife widely used in current cloud infrastructure, thanks to the extensible filter design. The best part of Envoy's filter is that you can define your own filtering, routing and transformation logic easily with Lua or WASM and plug them into the Envoy server to achieve things that cannot be done with the built-in filters.

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Marshall Jones
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Fang-Pen Lin
December 2, 2021

VGS Zero Data™: A Warp Drive for Payment Data

Humans have not been to the Moon in fifty years, but the space race is hotter than ever. In 2012, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left our Solar System with a copy of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In 2020, a Chinese lunar rover explored what lies beneath the Moon’s surface with ground-penetrating radar. Last week, Russia tested an anti-satellite weapon, which created so much debris that astronauts aboard the International Space Station prepared for possible evacuation. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes to send humans to Mars by 2024.

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Kenneth Geers, PhD
October 24, 2021

Announcing VGS Payment Orchestration: Bringing Harmony to Your Payments Environment

This morning, the VGS Team at Money 20/20 in Vegas officially launched VGS Payment Optimization to the market. The flagship feature of this suite of products is Payment Orchestration, which allows clients to integrate easily with - and then route transactions among - payment gateways and Payment Service Providers (PSPs). A single, low-code integration to the VGS platform lets you set custom routing logic to reduce costs and increase transaction throughput while aggregating and owning all your payments data.

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Philip Andrew Sjogren
October 24, 2021

VGS Payment Optimization Releases Account Updater

What It Is & Why It Matters

Many of us can remember our introduction to the power of compound interest at a young age. Maybe it was a grade school math teacher narrating the rice and chessboard fable or an early financial literacy course scaring you into saving for retirement by quoting Einstein: “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it … he who doesn't pays it.”

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Philip Andrew Sjogren
August 3, 2021

A Proven PenTest Methodology

Penetration Tests, an Introduction



When your business is online, the front door of your business is directly in front of every potential customer. Unfortunately, it’s just as easy for attackers, fraudsters, and anyone who wants to prey on you and your customers to be at your doorstep too. With carefully architected locks and controls, you can make sure that your door only opens for your customers.

Penetration tests, or pen tests, are a critical part of making sure your controls remain as strong as you think they are. Specifically, it is important that your pen tests are conducted by a skilled external firm. And this is true even if your organization has a competent internal security team – even in our case, with a competent and specialized internal security team to support our data security business.

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Mike Jensen
July 7, 2021

How Zero Data Reduces the Impact of Ransomware

The Challenge of Ransomware



The threat from ransomware, a type of malware that encrypts your files and holds them hostage for purposes of extortion, is currently rising. In 2020, there were 65,000 ransomware attacks reported in the United States. In the summer of 2021, two major ransomware attacks were even called threats to national security. Colonial Pipeline paid $5 Million in ransom after hackers successfully shut down part of its East Coast operations. JBS paid $11 million in ransom as cybercriminals disrupted its food supply operations to restaurants, grocery stores, and farmers.

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Mike Jensen
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Kenneth Geers, PhD
July 1, 2021

VGS + Web Application Firewall: Part 2

VGS + WAF = <3

“VGS + Web Application Firewall: Part 1” discussed the need for enterprises to invest in a Web Application Firewall, or WAF, as part of a defense-in-depth security strategy. This follow-up blog explores where to position your WAF, specifically in relation to your VGS proxy, so it can best protect your applications and enterprise. The goal is to educate and empower you to secure your systems against the widest possible array of vulnerabilities and attacks.

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Mike Jensen
secondary author profile
Kenneth Geers, PhD
June 17, 2021

VGS + Web Application Firewall: Part 1

Today, web applications, or “web apps” for short, dominate the business landscape. They gather, store, and process the sensitive personal and financial data of millions of Internet users. We now spend the majority of our computing time in the cloud, accessing online services and resources, from e-mail to e-commerce, via our browser.

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Kenneth Geers, PhD
secondary author profile
Mike Jensen
February 4, 2021

Introducing VGS Satellite: Local Integration

VGS is disrupting the typical linear integration flow that most of us are used to.

What does that mean for you? Let’s take a few minutes to explore how you can now seamlessly integrate VGS without sharing any of your data. In a world where information is worth almost as much as gold, you need to be able to implicitly trust a system that will be responsible for your business-critical data. That’s why we created VGS Satellite.

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Andrew Slepakurov