Windocks Customers

Windocks is proud of our marquee customers spanning industries, including life sciences, finance, insurance, and retail, among others. While many of our customers are household names, we have many less famous, mid market customers who have not only made their dev and test more efficient with Windocks automation but have benefitted from real-world reductions in operating costs by using our platform.

We invite you to learn more about our customers' experiences and to join us all in our journey to bring DevOps into the data layer.

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LIFE SCIENCES

Novartis

World's second largest pharmaceutical company by market cap. Shares R&D data across multiple research centers worldwide.

RETAIL

DriveTime

Innovative company utilizing proprietary tools and processes to redefine the process of purchasing, financing, and protecting vehicles.

INSURANCE

American Family Insurance

Third-largest mutual property/casualty insurance company in the U.S. Automates the delivery of applications in its direct-to-consumer business.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

DoubleLine

Money management firm employing active risk management, in-depth research, and innovative product solutions. Employs analytical systems developed and maintained in-house.

A CLOSER LOOK

Common Themes

Common Challenges

Windocks customers often report the following challenges:

How to continuously deliver higher quality applications to clients by testing with production data copies
Ensuring compliance with regulations on sensitive production data (PII data)
How to reduce the costs of the development, test, staging database environments needed for software releases

Common Requirements

What many customers have brought forward are requirements around orchestrating multiple services such as security, data masking, database cloning and SQL Server containers to deliver large SQL Server databases on demand to continuous integration / deployment (CI/CD) DevOps pipelines as well as authorized test team members, while ensuring compliance and auditability.

Evaluating solutions and selecting Windocks

While evaluating solutions, some of the top reasons customers have chosen Windocks have included:

SQL Server containers for Windows Windocks offers the only SQL Server container technology for Windows. Containers are important because CI/CD pipelines require dev, test and staging environments to be delivered and torn down quickly. Pipelines often already deploy applications using containers and it was natural to need containers for the data as well. Since many customers use Active Directory security and have production data on SQL Server Windows, many select Windocks for the database orchestration solution because it includes SQL Server Windows containers.
No code required - The Windocks database orchestration service uniquely offers the ability to avoid writing and maintaining code to manage storage infrastructure, clone volumes, mount volumes, attach databases to database servers, track clones, remove databases, etc. Instead customer team members merely provide a config spec in the form of a dockerfile and the Windocks database orchestration system automatically orchestrates the cloning, security, containerization and delivery of the data based on the dockerfile.
Open, standards based technology - Windocks includes a data cloning service based on standard operating system file systems, a container service based on standard container technology / API from Docker Inc, standard Kubernetes support, and security for containers based on standard Active Directory. Alternative offerings from other vendors are often based on proprietary file systems, with no container or Kubernetes support

Benefits

These unique capabilities described above deliver powerful benefits, enabling technology teams to align easily with the business teams to deliver success quickly

Ease of deployment Within weeks, customers are able to successfully pilot and deploy Windocks with their data to deliver a successful proof of concept. Trial customers can take full advantage of the Windocks full featured evaluation edition and 30 day support provided at no-cost.
Ease of maintenance Over time, technical teams discover that they have minimal maintenance work because of the "no code required" capabilities of Windocks. Changes to data requirements merely have to be provided in the form of a spec (dockerfile). The Windocks orchestration service automatically delivers based on the changed spec (dockerfile).
Dramatically lower costs. Customers can reduce the number of machines and storage used for lower level database environments (dev, test, staging) by over 70%. In addition, the cost of maintaining these environments (database and machine administration) is reduced by more than 80%
Ease of collaboration across remote teams Teams in different locations can work together to deliver the database orchestration for DevOpspipelines and reporting. Because Windocks is a modern server side only technology, it is easy for these remote teams to work together on the rollout without having to track client side installs which all the other alternatives required. Post rollout, technology team members have the ability to work together easily on the same data because Windocks delivers identical clones from the same data image. People in different locations can collaborate easily because they do not need client side tools and have identical clones of the same data.

What does the deployed database orchestration solution look like?

The successful rollout of the Windocks database orchestration service above all fits in easily into the existing continuous integration / deployment pipelines and systems that deliver data. The solution includes the following components:

Database orchestration service - This is the overall Windocks database orchestration services that uses a spec to orchestrate the security service, data cloning service, and the container service to continuously deliver data on demand
Database cloning - The Windocks data cloning service is based on the Windows file system and delivers clones of very large databases in seconds.
Container service - Windocks SQL Server container service for Windows can be used to stand up SQL Server environments running on different ports all on a single machine. These SQL Server containers use Active Directory authentication. Windocks database orchestration also supports Linux docker container services for SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL.
Security service - Windocks authorizes users to use the database orchestration service based on user accounts and groups. Different "data images" can be configured to authorize access to different groups of people. Windocks also provides the database masking technology that obfuscates sensitive data so that customers can comply with regulations on data security

Benefits to the business

The deployment of modern database orchestration (cloning, security, and containers) for DevOps has resulted in customers being able to continuously deliver high quality banking applications to its customers while reducing the costs of delivery. These improvements are accompanied by better compliance with customer data security regulations.