Guarding Precious Assets: WatchGuard Adopts DevOps Approach for Competitive Advantage

WatchGuard Technologies, a Seattle-based, leading provider of cyber security technology, is known around the world for its iconic and striking red firewalls. But its true brand promise extends well beyond the color of its devices to the criticality of its mission: protecting customer assets against cyber attacks. 

Delivering on that promise for its 80,000 customers and keeping ahead of the competition requires innovation and WatchGuard has found advantages through the adoption of DevOps.

“We can’t afford to be complacent about what we have already offered; it’s about what else we have to offer our customers,” says Jack Waters, senior vice president of engineering at WatchGuard.

WatchGuard certainly isn’t complacent and capitalized on an opportunity to move away from its traditional waterfall development approach toward one based on DevOps and agile development, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).

This new approach, including the adoption of CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, has enabled WatchGuard to innovate faster, improve its market position and further cement its standing as a leader in security for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

While speed is imperative, it’s never at the expense of quality. “We’re now able to get big things done noticeably faster. Whether it’s implementing encryption or changing the way our back-end databases are set up. Activities that would take months are now taking days to weeks to complete,” says Waters.

The shift in approach has yielded considerable benefits including completing large-scale projects significantly faster, onboarding new development teams 95% faster and reduced administrative overhead, which all translate to more engineering time for innovation.

For WatchGuard’s Jai Misra, vice president of engineering, innovation leads to competitive advantage. “It helps us add more value quickly with an assurance of the quality that is associated with the WatchGuard name.”

To learn more about WatchGuard’s DevOps approach and results, read the case study .