Xero Chooses Cloudpassage Halo for Workload Security at Devops Speed
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Country
- Worldwide
- United States
Product
- CloudPassage Halo
Tech Stack
- AWS EC2
- DevOps
- CI/CD
- Splunk
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Cloud Security
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
- Manufacturing System Automation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Cybersecurity Services
About The Customer
Xero is a company that develops cloud-based accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses. They have over 860,000 subscribers in more than 180 countries, and their software accounts for over $1 trillion of incoming and outgoing transactions per year. In 2014, after several years of strong growth, Xero knew that they needed some new technologies to support their next wave of growth. Specifically, Xero needed technologies that would enable fast scalability, fast infrastructure deployment, and automated security.
The Challenge
In 2014, Xero was experiencing strong growth and needed new technologies to support their next wave of growth. They needed technologies that would enable fast scalability, fast infrastructure deployment, and automated security. Xero solved the first two challenges by moving their IT infrastructure from a traditional outsourced datacenter environment to a public cloud environment— Amazon Web Services. However, finding a security system that was fully automated and could keep up with their fast-paced DevOps environment was a challenge. Most IT security products on the market would not perform efficiently in such an environment. Xero’s lead security architect, Aaron McKeown, wanted to provide Xero’s DevOps teams with a set of strong security controls that could be baked into their DevOps processes, not bolted on after the fact.
The Solution
After a lengthy search for the right security tool, McKeown chose CloudPassage Halo. Halo met all of McKeown’s requirements, and then some. Built for speed, Halo is fully automated, everything from installation of agents all the way through to policy assignment, alerting ,and reporting. Halo’s architecture supports elastic operating environments and can scale just as fast as your operations teams can deploy new workloads. McKeown was able to realize his dream that developers would never need to log into the Halo security console. All operations could be done programatically through the API. Halo includes several different kinds of security controls that allowed McKeown to minimize the software attack surface, reduce the network attack surface, ensure that Xero’s workloads have not been compromised, and maintain compliance with PCI data regulations. Halo is able to transmit all of the information that it learns about the security posture of Xero’s workloads to Xero’s SIEM which is Splunk.
Operational Impact
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