Tech Innovator Improves Control Over Cloud Usage to Save Money and Strengthen Security Compliance
INDUSTRY
Technology
BENEFITS
- Improved visibility into cloud usage to right size underutilized resources and save hundreds of dollars per month in cloud spend
- Streamlined management to enable small IT team to focus on business
- Identified security compliance issues to help minimize risk
SOLUTION
Xi Beam by Nutanix
Cloud Environment
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
BUSINESS BENEFITS
Data is the engine that drives digital transformation, and Jitterbit is helping forward-looking companies make the most of it. Its iPaaS platform lets organizations in many different industries connect SaaS, on-premises, and cloud applications, so that they can infuse artificial intelligence into any business process. To manage this solution for customers, Jitterbit relies on a number of AWS cloud services. However, gaining insight into hundreds of cloud services isn’t easy, so Jitterbit turned to Xi Beam to understand usage, take control of cloud consumption, and reduce waste.
Without Beam, the level of audit and overview that we need simply doesn’t get done. Checking every service in every single region isn’t practical, and I would never have found the additional servers running in regions we don’t normally use. It would have taken all day to track them down manually.
– Jacob Stanton, Director of Information Security/ISO, Jitterbit
CHALLENGE
Jitterbit has operations running in six regions, with multiple AWS EC2 instances in each one, and approximately 500 servers. Maintaining optimal usage and ensuring security compliance of these servers across a global organization is not easy, especially with a full-time IT staff of just five. “If you look out at your front lawn, think about all the blades of grass, and consider which one might have something wrong with it,” said Jacob Stanton, Director of Information Security/ISO at Jitterbit. “Our Amazon infrastructure extends across many regions and zones. If you’re trying to audit security groups, it’s very difficult, because there is so much there.” Stanton and his team needed a solution that would help simplify management of its cloud environments, so they could better understand how, where, and when Jitterbit was consuming cloud services—and which ones might pose compliance risks due to misconfigurations.
SOLUTION
With Beam, Jitterbit can automate compliance checks using its event-driven security audits and also take control of its costs. Beam helps Jitterbit spot idle or under-utilized resources such as old snapshots, underutilized EC2 instances, unattached EBS instances, and unused RDS instances. “We have legitimate servers in many places, but we don’t know if all of them are needed,” said Stanton. “Beam gives us an overview of that massive chaos. We were able to find a resource that had been out there for years, with nobody ever using it. The database had been costing the company hundreds of dollars a month. Beam helped us find and stop the instance and save money.”
Built for multi-cloud governance, Beam lets Jitterbit track its cost consumption across all its cloud resources, at granular levels. “You could do many of these tasks yourself, but it would take you a massive amount of time,” said Stanton. “Small IT teams just can’t do that, because they have other more important priorities.”
RESULTS
Beam helps Jitterbit take the guesswork out of discovering which resources are actually needed to serve customers, setting up efficiencies that save the organization money on services it doesn’t require. “I saw value in Beam pretty much instantly, when we found some databases that were not being used,” said Stanton. “Our previous CTO had spun up some demo servers in a region that we don’t normally use, then they were forgotten about. Beam discovered them, and we shut them down. It delivers an overview that we can’t get any other way. It’s difficult to see what’s happening with AWS, and its hundreds of services running cross dozens of regions. Beam really gives us the ability to see the big picture.”
As Director of Security, Stanton is constantly exploring better ways to safeguard his organization’s data. Beam lets Jitterbit automate compliance checks for its cloud operations, using more than 300 audits to identify security loopholes. “I have not yet discovered a critical security issue with Beam, but I’ve found hundreds of instances where security could be better, and the risk adds up,” said Stanton. “For example, I found a region where the AWS configuration had been disabled, and it should have been enabled.” Beam’s built-in automation is also streamlining operations, to help free up storage resources and save time for administrators to focus on other tasks. “We automate the deletion of storage snapshots that are more than 90 days old, which helps us get more out of our storage space.”
NEXT STEPS
Like most companies, Jitterbit is constantly evolving and contending with new priorities and challenges. Nutanix is continually improving and adding new security compliance and cost optimization features to Beam, making it a great match for a leading tech innovator. “I’d like to do more with the Beam security module,” said Stanton. “I do use it, and I’m hoping to use it more.”