Western Union Scales Cloud Infrastructure and Optimizes Costs

Background

Western Union has been a global leader in money transfer and payment services for over 170 years, operating in more than 200 countries and serving over 150 million customers.  

The company’s mission is to “make financial services accessible to people everywhere” by building and offering easy-to-use products and services that bridge digital and physical, providing customers with choice, security, and reliability. 

Western Union's platform facilitates cross-border transactions, bill payments, and a large portfolio of other financial services. Its development department consists of over 2,000 developers managing more than 200 applications, which speaks to the scale and complexity of its worldwide operations.

Challenge

Given the vast scale of its operations, Western Union faced significant challenges in managing and scaling its cloud infrastructure. 

Specifically, Western Union's IaC deployment processes fell short of the company's high standards for cohesion and efficiency, with many issues stemming from different teams using a mix of methodologies and non-dedicated solutions such as Jenkins, Cloudbees, Spinnaker, and Morpheus, as well as different IaC frameworks – primarily, Cloudformation and Terraform.

This situation resulted in prolonged deployment times, over-reliance on manual processes, lack of broad visibility, and sub-par cost controls, leading to unpredictable IaC-related expenses and difficulties aligning with the overall FinOps strategy.

Lastly, as it was looking to modernize its IaC usage, the company also sought a way to better comply with the demanding regulations of its industry, which required meticulous attention to security, uptime, and other critical performance metrics.

Solution

To remedy the situation, Western Union embarked on a thorough search to identify an IaC management solution that would unify and optimize IaC usage across the organization. 

Equally important, they were looking for a strategic partner to assist with the implementation and scaling of their IaC operations, bridging expertise gaps in adopting new technologies.

During their due diligence, the team assessed several leading commercial solutions, including HashiCorp’s Terraform Cloud, as well as cloud-native tools like Azure DevOps. 

After careful consideration, Western Union determined that env0 was the best fit for their IaC management needs, with other options falling short in terms of visibility capabilities, integration options, ease of use, and other POC criteria.

As part of their POC summary, Western Union commended env0’s technical support for quickly resolving issues and providing a clear path to value, as well as for functioning as IaC consultants and helping adopt DevOps best practices and strategies.

In the words of Troy E. Lillehoff, Western Union’s VP of Cloud Strategy: “You taught us how to fish.”

Results

Following a successful POC, Western Union became an env0 customer and expanded the use of the platform, leading to the following outcomes:

• Enhanced Security and Compliance: The team implemented dynamic Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and granular pre-deployment checks via Open Policy Agent (OPA). These ensured that security and compliance standards were proactively met, providing a superior alternative to post-deployment scans.
  
  
• Accelerated Deployment Times: env0’s platform, described by the team as “the easiest IaC tool for developers,” enabled engineers to deploy IaC in a self-service model without causing any disruption, thanks to the OPA-defined guardrails. Having this ‘golden path’ resolved DevOps bottlenecks and reduced deployment times from weeks to hours, and even minutes.
  
  
• Improved IaC Cost Efficiency: Leveraging env0's cost controls and FinOps integration, the team facilitated proactive cost management and aligned with the organization's FinOps strategy. This resulted in the implementation of a "chargeback" model and a significant reduction in IaC-related costs.
  
  
• Unified View of all IaC Resources: Using env0 provided various R&D teams with a shared source of truth for IaC-related activities. This facilitated collaboration on shared projects and offered an easy way to observe and analyze IaC usage across the entire organization and three different cloud providers.
  
  
• Streamlined Cross-team Processes: Using env0’s integration options, security, and FinOps teams were able to embed their policies into IaC deployment flows, ensuring effortless coordination with the R&D groups.

Next: On-Prem

Partnering with env0 helped Western Union improve security, boost deployment speeds, optimize costs, and align its IaC strategy with the latest best practices, significantly enhancing reliability and collaboration.

With the demonstrated success in the cloud, Western Union’s next steps include expanding its use of env0 to include on-premise use cases. 

The IaC automation and management solutions offered by env0, along with its developer self-service capabilities, are now a constant part of Western Union’s cloud strategy and a key driver of its future growth.