Zoom surpasses its growth goals with Atlassian Cloud products

An end-to-end solution for efficiency, security, and scalability 

As Zoom’s engineers set out to find the perfect solution to help build and scale their system, they concentrated on secure, reliable providers who offer a comprehensive platform, rather than a single, siloed tool. Being able to manage multiple workflows – software development, approvals, testing, project management, and more – with one integrated solution would make management and scaling easier. 

“As an IT department, we want to invest in capable cloud platform vendors like Atlassian. I don’t want to see all these different, siloed cloud solutions that are creating duplication. It increases the cost of ownership and impacts usability and visibility,” Gary explains. “Suddenly you lose track of how many tools you have, and you’re putting your security and compliance in jeopardy as well.” 

After zeroing in and evaluating a small set of end-to-end platforms, Engineering selected Atlassian Cloud products thanks to their rock-solid security, high performance, and seamless integrations with each other and with Zoom’s other critical tools.

Engineers appreciated how Jira Software and Confluence simplified the product development lifecycle all the way from planning and design through engineering, testing, and customer support. Since much of Zoom’s work is cross-functional, departments that interacted with Engineering noticed the team’s streamlined workflows and saw opportunities to leverage Atlassian Cloud products for their own projects.

Over time, thousands of employees throughout the organization adopted the platform to power their work and collaborate with each other. “Almost everyone uses Atlassian products now: Tech Support, system engineers, engineers, product teams, security, and more,” Gary says. Jira Software is Zoom’s go-to tool for development and technical project management. Confluence serves as the single source of truth for documentation and communication. Statuspage makes real-time incident management and communication simple. Plus, several teams are trying Trello for project management.

Atlassian Access provides enhanced security and single sign-on. “Atlassian Access is, for us, a mandatory component,” Gary says. “Otherwise, my employees will need separate access and entry points for each tool.”

Security and control, alongside massive growth

Since embracing Atlassian Cloud products across the company, Zoom’s team has enjoyed their simple scalability, security and performance, and centralized admin controls – all while the company grew faster than even they may have imagined.

“I don’t want to get woken up in the middle of the night with someone trying to tell me, ‘Gary, the server is down, the database is down,’” Gary says. “The back end of Atlassian’s Cloud is great. I don’t have to worry about optimal performance.”

Zoom also invested heavily in security from the beginning and continues to work hard to maintain trust in their platform as they grow. “In addition to security, we also look at data privacy and overall compliance because we provide video capabilities to a lot of large companies worldwide who have specific requirements,” Gary reports.

Centralizing administrative controls has been a growing priority as Zoom has expanded, too. Atlassian Access is a simple way for IT to get a handle on which employees are using each tool and to pull usage reports. The tool also saves money by reducing the number of IT employees

required to manage the system. “It’s important to me to be very efficient in my administrative

control. Atlassian does that really well,” Gary explains. “Access is one good example. With just one piece of an element, I can set up SSO and MFA and access all the Atlassian products. That’s the kind of centralized admin control that we need.”

Gary’s team plans to extend these benefits in the near future by integrating Atlassian Cloud products with other tools used in their daily workflows. “We use very specific user access and identity management products,” Gary says. “We want our cloud solution to be compatible with all the things we have already built in terms of providing access control, monitoring your backup,

restoring, things like that.”

As Zoom embeds Atlassian deeper into their workflows, the team looks forward to elevating the experience even more for employees and customers.

A small team makes a big impact, thanks to a well-suited solution

Although Zoom never could have predicted the wild growth they experienced in 2020, they were more than prepared, thanks to their cloud-first approach. By building a world-class product and collaborating with Atlassian to support it with secure, high-performance cloud infrastructure, their small-yet-mighty team has raced to the top of the video conferencing software ratings. Ranked #1 across major customer review sites like Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, and

G2, Zoom is proof that it doesn’t take a huge team to make a huge impact on an industry – and the world.

Gary’s top takeaway: prevent the proliferation of apps

Zoom’s IT team has worked diligently to position themselves as a strategic, proactive collaborator for colleagues across the organization. Gary says this approach has helped maximize the value that employees receive out of the solution and avoid accumulating a disparate collection of tools that increases costs, reduces usability and productivity, and impedes security. “Cloud is very easy. You can sign up and start using it quickly. The flip side of

that is when employees or business units sign up for their own cloud services, it turns into a proliferation of apps,” Gary explains. “IT departments need to try to get ahead and work with business units right upfront. Try to understand and anticipate their business requirements, and get them to take advantage of what you have before they go sign up for a bunch of cloud services.”