Digitally Transforming A Company Enabling Them To Go Public
IronetNet
Cybersecurity (IRNT – NYSE)
IronNet is a market-leading cybersecurity software company whose Collective Defense Platform leverages advanced AI-driven Network Detection and Response (NDR) capabilities to detect and prioritize anomalous activity inside individual enterprise network environments.
THE SITUATION
Founded in 2014, IronNet Cybersecurity’s two core offerings as part of its Collective Defense platform, IronDefense, and IronDome, are cutting-edge technology. Throughout six years of rapid Collective Defense growth serving hundreds of customers internationally, IronNet continued to invest to ensure their products are technologically advanced and best of breed in their market. For IronNet, it is paramount to ensure they innovate rapidly, deliver value efficiently and scale while providing a world-class experience.
The IronNet product leadership team determined that IronDome and IronDefense must scale to support orders of magnitude more customers to meet expected demand. IronNet wanted to improve the architecture to be leaner, increase performance, and leverage SAAS and Amazon Web Services design best practices as they evolved both products.
THE OPPORTUNITY
IronNet faced the duopoly of onboarding large volumes of new customers while supporting and extending their products to service them as it tried to define their product evolution. After a few months of effort, IronNet reached an impasse – their software and architecture engineers were fully utilized, impeding its ability to design the desired architecture changes as quickly and efficiently as they required. At this time, the Chief Product Officer engaged FifthVantage as a trusted technical advisor based on its experience in rapidly creating large-scale SAAS and Cloud Computing products to assist with a path forward toward the new technology goals.
Upon arrival, FifthVantage worked with the IronNet Architecture and Engineering teams to perform a current state and desired end state assessment, including technology choices and decisions involving:
- Interviews with team members including Engineering Executives, Product Management, Architects, Development, and Operations
- Evaluation of engineering objectives and team skills
- End to end assessment of legacy and existing new technology
- Evaluation of proposed use of AWS technologies
- Reviews of desired technical investment decisions for the future
FifthVantage concluded that IronNet needed changes in technology, architecture design, and the AWS technologies adopted to achieve its 12-18 month goals. It was mutually agreed upon that FifthVantage would assume an architecture advisory role in close collaboration with IronNet’s product leadership and architecture team to facilitate the required transformation. This approach allowed the IronNet team to work alongside and learn from FifthVantgage, and as agreed upon deliverables were completed, seamlessly step back into their ownership.
SOLUTION AND IMPACT
Over 18 months, FifthVantage advised the IronNet team on a range of technology decisions, including API design and simplification, optimal multi-tenancy architectures, most efficient use of storage and compute resources, database scale-out strategies, and choosing which AWS managed services to use. FifthVantage has also helped IronNet:
- Develop a multi-year architecture roadmap for IronDome
- Develop a technical choice-making framework based on clear goals, objective analysis, and hands-on assessment
- Perform advanced technology assessments for use in their products
- Develop digital engineering best practices to incubate and launch new SAAS capabilities more rapidly
- Aided engineering leadership to transform the culture to a SAAS-first mindset
- Develop software architecture diagrams for all audiences
IronNet successfully achieved its goals and became a publicly-traded company in 2021. IronNet today is the internationally recognized leader in Collective Defense.
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