Mysa, a fintech startup developing finance automation platforms, faced challenges building and maintaining CI/CD infrastructure while adhering to strict compliance requirements. Harness CI and CD eliminated the need to build custom infrastructure, provided reliable compliant pipelines, and achieved significant security improvements that helped pass VAPT security audits without major findings. The platform freed the entire team to focus on product development rather than infrastructure maintenance.
About Mysa
Mysa is developing a platform for finance automation for businesses. With Mysa, you can automate your cash flow management, accounting & taxes seamlessly.
Challenges
Mysa is an emerging startup in the midst of developing their software platform and product lines. As they began their journey, the company evaluated whether to invest in building their own CI/CD infrastructure. This unfortunately would require leadership to hire engineers and patch multiple open source products, all while trying to maintain consistency across all the pipelines.
Their peers in the industry have been investing heavily in building CI/CD infrastructure internally. Most of the time basic infrastructure was built by patching open-source technologies and developers rarely went on to create advanced CI/CD features. Another significant challenge was maintaining consistency across different projects and teams.
As the organization grew, they often found themselves managing multiple CI/CD pipelines, each with its own unique requirements and configurations. Ensuring that best practices are followed consistently across all pipelines can be difficult, leading to potential security vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, and increased maintenance overhead.
“As the organization grows, it becomes more and more painful to manage that infrastructure. Developer productivity also suffers because of the reliability of pipelines. We didn’t want to go this route, and were looking for a SaaS tool to solve our problems.” - Ashutosh Panigrahi, Founding Engineer/CTO of Mysa
Building and maintaining CI/CD infrastructure while adhering to compliance requirements also presents significant challenges for organizations, particularly those operating in highly regulated industries. Mysa was very aware that governance was another area that needed to be addressed quickly. “Being in fin-tech, compliance becomes a first priority. One of our pre-requisites for the tool was to be able to achieve our compliance needs,” said Ashutosh.
Solution
Robust, secure, and compliant CI/CD pipelines are paramount in today's fast-paced software development landscape. They serve as the backbone of modern software delivery, enabling organizations to rapidly and consistently deliver high-quality software.
The Harness platform is designed to assist developers and DevOps teams in delivering software with maximum speed, quality, security, reliability, and resilience at the lowest possible cost. And it helped Mysa stay within the governance boundaries required to achieve their organizational objectives.
“Harness brings in a reliable and compliant CI/CD pipeline infrastructure for Mysa. Without allocating engineering bandwidth , engineers are having the luxury of using extremely advanced CI/CD flows to bring reliability to our products.” - Mohit Joshi, Lead Engineer of Mysa.
Some notable results from the deployment include:
- No engineers are working on building CI/CD infrastructure, which saves Mysa hiring at least 2 engineers, as well as bandwidth finding candidates, interviewing, and offering.
- VAPT of their code-base with an external partner passed without any major findings as developers pro-actively fixed security warnings as part of the STO suite.
- Implementing “shift-Left” testing approaches for security tests saved 15% of Mysa engineers bandwidth who would have spent this extra time post VAPT.
- They were also able to save 40% of SRE engineers time as they didn’t need to build things around approval workflows and secret management.
“Harness Support has also been great all throughout. I vividly remember when we were facing issues with their IAAC product, their lead engineer came on the call and helped us solve the issue.”
