Chris Horvat, VP of Engineering and Architecture
"We want to be a CI/CD organization. We want our customers to be able to keep pace with the speed of updates that we want. We want better visibility into our customer environments, and we want a consistent golden image of our product that is something we can confidently test. Replicated enables that."
Company Size:
50
Industry:
Cybersecurity
Challenge
SCYTHE is a proactive cybersecurity platform that empowers organizations to defend against evolving threats through adversarial emulation and validation. SCYTHE enables users to simulate real-world attack scenarios via customizable threat campaigns, correlate data/events with existing security tools, and measure the effectiveness of their security controls. Trusted by enterprises across industries, SCYTHE drives continuous security improvement and resilience against modern cyber threats.
SCYTHE’s customers wanted both a managed SaaS instance and an on-premises model, and to accommodate this SCYTHE developed different build paths for each. This included full Windows licensed EC2 instances in the cloud, which brought forth many challenges for both their internal development and support teams as well as their end customers. To make the SCYTHE experience better across the board, increase cost and time savings, and improve development and DevOps efficiency, they knew they needed to move to a containerized model.
They wanted a single build that would work in both SaaS and on-premises environments. “Our original legacy customers are on-prem - that’s never going to go away. How do we do this with one way to build the product?” Chris Kesler, Director of Engineering, asked. “We don’t have enough people for that. We’re a startup. What do we do?” They decided to explore Replicated.
SCYTHE’s customers wanted both a managed SaaS instance and an on-premises model, and to accommodate this SCYTHE developed different build paths for each. This included full Windows licensed EC2 instances in the cloud, which brought forth many challenges for both their internal development and support teams as well as their end customers. To make the SCYTHE experience better across the board, increase cost and time savings, and improve development and DevOps efficiency, they knew they needed to move to a containerized model.
They wanted a single build that would work in both SaaS and on-premises environments. “Our original legacy customers are on-prem - that’s never going to go away. How do we do this with one way to build the product?” Chris Kesler, Director of Engineering, asked. “We don’t have enough people for that. We’re a startup. What do we do?” They decided to explore Replicated.
“Like most startups our customer support isn’t very technical, so anything beyond basic requests would eventually fall into the engineering team side. We would have to do one-on-ones with the customer to help them through the upgrade process. And this was with each and every upgrade.”
Chris Horvat,
VP of Engineering
and Architecture
VP of Engineering
and Architecture
Solution
SCYTHE’s team included an engineer who had previously worked with Replicated, so SCYTHE was able to see and experience the value of Replicated quickly. One of these values was gaining new insight into their application’s state within their customers’ environments. Before Replicated, SCYTHE was unable to see if and how their customers were using their application. Now, all the SCYTHE team has to do is log into the Replicated Vendor portal, and that information and more is immediately available.
Replicated was also especially valuable in improving SCYTHE’s customers’ upgrade experience. “Like most startups our customer support isn’t very technical, so anything beyond basic requests would eventually fall into the engineering team side,” says Chris Horvat. “We would have to do one-on-ones with the customer to help them through the upgrade process. And this was with each and every upgrade.” For example, if the Scythe team was spending 2.5 hours with each customer for every upgrade, and their customers upgraded 4 times a year, the Scythe team could spend up to 350 hours per year just upgrading a small handful of customers.
Now, SCYTHE is able to utilize Replicated’s click-to-update model, and greatly improved how quickly they’re able to push updates out to customers. “Our original on-prem customers were such a support nightmare to upgrade them on Windows,” says Chris Horvat. “We wondered if there was just some way to do that in the Web browser.” Luckily, they found this in Replicated.
Before Replicated, SCYTHE was in a semi-annual to quarterly release cycle. After adopting Replicated, they now release with every sprint. Within the next 6-9 months, they anticipate being on a weekly release train, if not daily. SCYTHE can deliver fixes and features orders of magnitude faster than they ever did before. They’ve even found that some customers are renewing more quickly, and paying more upfront, thanks to the functionality that Replicated provides.
Replicated was also especially valuable in improving SCYTHE’s customers’ upgrade experience. “Like most startups our customer support isn’t very technical, so anything beyond basic requests would eventually fall into the engineering team side,” says Chris Horvat. “We would have to do one-on-ones with the customer to help them through the upgrade process. And this was with each and every upgrade.” For example, if the Scythe team was spending 2.5 hours with each customer for every upgrade, and their customers upgraded 4 times a year, the Scythe team could spend up to 350 hours per year just upgrading a small handful of customers.
Now, SCYTHE is able to utilize Replicated’s click-to-update model, and greatly improved how quickly they’re able to push updates out to customers. “Our original on-prem customers were such a support nightmare to upgrade them on Windows,” says Chris Horvat. “We wondered if there was just some way to do that in the Web browser.” Luckily, they found this in Replicated.
Before Replicated, SCYTHE was in a semi-annual to quarterly release cycle. After adopting Replicated, they now release with every sprint. Within the next 6-9 months, they anticipate being on a weekly release train, if not daily. SCYTHE can deliver fixes and features orders of magnitude faster than they ever did before. They’ve even found that some customers are renewing more quickly, and paying more upfront, thanks to the functionality that Replicated provides.
Within the next 6-9 months, SCYTHE anticipates being on a weekly release train, if not daily.
"Everyone here really appreciates the click-to-update model, which is huge in terms of customer experience and how quickly we can get our updates pushed out to customers. It definitely gives us lots of momentum."
Jeremy McIntyre,
Sr. Platform Engineer
Sr. Platform Engineer
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