How Blink Helps XM Cyber Achieve Operational Excellence

Shifting-Left DevOps and FinOps Workflows

‍XM Cyber is a leading cloud security company that provides innovative network security products. For example, with their Attack Path Management platform, organizations can quickly identify vulnerabilities and better prevent cyberattacks. XM Cyber provides mission-critical services to their clients 24/7/365.

How do they stay ahead? They chose Blink.

XM Cyber relies on Blink for automating various use-cases, including straightforward cloud infrastructure management, cost optimization and internal business processes.

Blink integrates out of the box with XM Cyber’s existing cloud infrastructure technologies such as AWS, Jenkins, and GitHub and is seamlessly weaved into the process through integrations with Slack and email.

Problem: Identifying AWS EC2 instances scheduled to retire

XM Cyber’s service is deployed on a large AWS infrastructure (over 500 EC2 instances at any given time.) There is no easy way to identify retired instances or those about to retire in AWS. EC2 instances don’t retire every day, but when they do, it could cause EC2 to stop running and cause data drop.

Locating retiring instances takes up valuable hours of productive time for XM Cyber DevOps. Automation is a must. It would take weeks to generate an automated workflow using a CI/CD pipeline. The small XM Cyber DevOps team just didn’t have the time to do so while trying to keep up with business demands.

Solution

Blink reduced this time-intensive task to a simple automation to find retired or near-retired EC2 instances. The automation runs overnight and alerts the DevOps team in Slack, preventing critical failures.

“Finding EC2 instances scheduled to retire is a pain in AWS. Blink transformed an annoying task I do every week into a workflow automation that finds and resolves any EC2 issues for me, so I can focus on more important objectives.”
– Artiom Levinton, Cloud Architect, XMCyber

Problem: Automating customer license process securely and efficiently

XM Cyber’s finance department previously used their CI/CD tool, Jenkins, to create new customer licenses. This process of users independently running Jenkins jobs was difficult to manage and maintain. This process didn’t neatly fit the Jenkins use case and required time and resources for onboarding. It also required exposure to people who shouldn’t have Jenkins access, creating significant reliability and security risks.

Solution

The Blink self-service portal provided a better user interface for internal stakeholders. Blink’s proactive system-of-action allowed XM Cyber to:

• Reduce the time it takes for generating licenses to a minimum
• Enhance user experience through an easy-to-use self-service interface and not an engineering-focused complicated tool
• Prevented unnecessary access to Jenkins, a critical tool used by engineering

The new process significantly reduced onboarding time, and automatically integrated with existing external systems.

“Blink transformed one of our most broken workflows, creating new client software licenses, into a streamlined no-code automation. Now our Sales and Marketing teams initiate new license creation workflows with 1-click in the Blink self-service portal.”
– Artiom Levinton, Cloud Architect, XM Cyber

Automate. Iterate. Accelerate.

Blink enables DevOps, SecOps, and all cloud-native operations teams to achieve unprecedented operational efficiency.

Blink increases productivity, reduces costs, and helps you do the things you do best, better. We do it for companies big and small across many industries, every single day. Check out our DevOps & FinOps operations use case and learn what we can do for you.

It only takes a few minutes to get started with Blink, the force multiplier that helps your DevOps or SecOps teams achieve operational excellence.