How Devada Uses CloudCheckr to Secure, Mature, and Automate

Overview

Devada is the leading resource for empowering developers around the world through its authoritative DZone.com media site.

DZone.com is visited by millions of developers each month to learn and share insights and best practices on technologies. Its cloud-based software solution, AnswerHub, allows companies of all sizes to positively engage developers via the vibrant communities we enable.

AnswerHub powers DZone.com and developer communities for many tech and tech-enabled giants, including IBM, Epic Games, and Disney Pixar.

Why CloudCheckr

DevOps Manager, Rick Garee, needed to build out Devada’s operational maturity, compliance, and automation capabilities. CloudCheckr, from Spot by NetApp, was the right choice for the job and has helped Devada achieve these critical business objectives.

CloudCheckr has a proven track record of helping businesses by reducing overhead, increasing usability, and making the most complex cloud infrastructures easy to manage.

“I chose CloudCheckr because of the sheer level of transparency. Right up front, you’re given a list of things that you can do to modify or optimize your cloud infrastructure for considerable cost savings,” said Garee.

Monitoring Compliance

It all began with an additional need for cloud security and compliance. For Devada to operate as a true SaaS solution, they needed to know how compliant they were today, and how to achieve total compliance within the cloud infrastructure they were managing. CloudCheckr’s compliance and monitoring functionality helped with this.

Before CloudCheckr, Devada was burning up to 90% of DevOps teams’ time with auditing questionnaires and preparation—a problem CloudCheckr was ready to fix.

CloudCheckr reduced the need for questionnaires, enabling Devada to succeed and ultimately market their SaaS solution as compliant with regulatory standards.

Building Operational Maturity

Prior to adopting CloudCheckr, Devada lacked a team-level thought process for managing infrastructure and the maturity to discover these issues. This led to confusion about the overall direction of their cloud infrastructure management.

Devada was looking for a higher-level management tool to help grow its SaaS environment. Through continuous monitoring and actionable insights, CloudCheckr was able to identify idle and underutilized resources in Devada’s cloud environment.

With over 150 customers using their SaaS solution, efficiency is key. CloudCheckr’s support of multi-cloud account management helps Devada save time by eliminating the process of logging into multiple different vendor solutions.

As a result, Devada’s DevOps’ team was able to:

• Identify routine management for Reserved Instances (RIs) and reduce stale environments throughout AWS
• Reduce onboarding costs for new hires
• Achieve $4k savings over the course of the first 3 months using CloudCheckr

Automating for Time Savings

In any SaaS environment, time can be a big roadblock when businesses don’t have the right tools at their disposal. Use auditing as an example, taking the time to monitor and evaluate compliance and overall adherence to regulations across any infrastructure can be a drain on resources.

CloudCheckr delivered a real, sustainable solution for Garee and his team. The comprehensive cloud management platform saved the organization money, enabled the department to optimize and clean up their cloud environment, and also kept them compliant.

Automation and total visibility of their cloud infrastructure though CloudCheckr continues to improve operational efficiency and help Devada scale.

Cover All Your Bases with CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr was the right platform for Devada to realize further growth. Garee and his DevOps team aim to keep expanding their use of CloudCheckr with an emphasis on achieving SOC2 compliance.

“It made it much easier to pinpoint and track certain areas of the environment in a centrally managed area,” Garee said. “From there, you can make other modifications to shave, you know, ten thousand dollars upfront off your operations costs.”