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.