CASE STUDY Zipwhip Scales Growing Business with Azure and AWS

Zipwhip, an innovative startup out of Seattle, Washington, is viewed as the texting vendor of choice for companies of all sizes. With over 20,000 customers, including well-known brands such as Farmers Insurance, Aflac, and The Medicine Shoppe, the company has been experiencing considerable growth. With Fortune 500 companies increasingly turning to Zipwhip, a move to the cloud was imminent.
 

Zipwhip's Cloud Challenges

Broad adoption by large enterprises was the key driver behind Zipwhip’s migration to the cloud. The company required a more reliable environment that could scale to meet market demand while decreasing spend. In addition, a cloud-based environment would allow Zipwhip to speed time-to-market availability of their SaaS platform, allowing them to avoid traditional procurement processes at lower costs. It is with these benefits in mind that Zipwhip moved to a multicloud environment (based on their desire to be cloud agnostic) and chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

To unleash the cloud’s full potential for fueling innovation, Platform Engineer Kolby Allen did not want visibility challenges or security risks get in the way. As a result, he looked for a proven multicloud management solution that would enable him to optimize his cloud infrastructure, while also automating cloud security and compliance across teams.
 

Finding a Solution

Zipwhip required a platform that actually analyzed data instead of simply consolidating the data. They also needed to manage their Azure and AWS environments, in conjunction with their Kubernetes container orchestration system (comprised of 13 container clusters). Further, Allen wanted the solution to be more than just a tool for his DevOps team. It needed to be useful for other personas, including executives. And finally, the solution had to address all of Zipwhip’s security concerns.

Zipwhip chose CloudHealth and CloudHealth Secure State. Allen had always been interested in CloudHealth and knew it was the best choice to optimize a multicloud environment through visibility, automation, and tighter control over cloud spend. In addition, Zipwhip is relying on CloudHealth Secure State to identify public cloud misconfigurations, visualize at-risk infrastructure, correlate cross-cloud threat activity, and automate security and compliance reporting across teams. Together, the two products form a powerful pairing that enables the company to effectively – and securely – scale its growing business. Finally, deployment was quick and required minimal ramp-up time. “The [VMware teams] made everything simple and deployment was fast,” stated Allen.

The Results

Since deploying CloudHealth, Zipwhip has migrated 90% of their infrastructure to the cloud within nine months. The move has allowed Zipwhip development teams to release features on an accelerated cadence, while CloudHealth has allowed Zipwhip to benefit from unprecedented levels of visibility into their multicloud environment. As a result, the company can easily keep an eye on spending and compare infrastructure costs. This includes analyzing what it takes to run servers vs. containers, while aligning those costs with revenue. “We spun up so much infrastructure last year and CloudHealth has enabled us to not only see growth, but also project and optimize that growth,” added Allen.

CloudHealth Secure State has also had a significant impact, allowing Zipwhip to detect vulnerabilities and threats at real-time speed, while automating security and compliance across multiple clouds.

Based on the success the company has been experiencing with CloudHealth and CloudHealth Secure State, Zipwhip is planning to expand usage. “Working with VMware and CloudHealth has been a fantastic experience. There have not been any negatives,” emphasized Allen.

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