Program snapshot
Introduction
Rapid7 is a cybersecurity platform relied on by thousands of organizations around the world to unify endpoint-to-cloud exposure management and detection and response, enabling teams to confidently anticipate threats and detect and respond to cyber attacks.
As a trusted security partner, Rapid7 must ensure utmost operational rigor in all areas of the business. Rapid7 chose Cortex as a partner to drive engineering efficiency through measurable improvements to project velocity and developer experience.
The initial “time to find” problem
In late 2021, long before many engineering teams were thinking about Internal Developer Portals (IDPs), Log4shell had just ground engineering productivity to a halt. Teams around the world spent days sifting through git, spreadsheets, and wikis to surface potentially affected software as well as responsible owners. For Elaine Hardwick (Director of Engineering) and Amanda Jackson (Program Manager) this was a pivotal moment.
“Log4shell took up a ton of the Platform team’s time—trying to piece together package and ownership information without knowing whether this information was up to date. This sent us into a deep dive of service catalogs like OpsLevel and Backstage to shore up information and shorten time-to-find ownership.”
While Log4shell may have been a catalyst for turning attention to new ways of shoring up information, this use case quickly evolved. Elaine continues,
“We needed a central place to not only track information about software, but information about how it’s built. We wanted to ask which software was meeting the highest levels of operational maturity? Has everyone made the switch from core infrastructure to newer modules? Are vulnerabilities surfaced actioned on within our SLAs? We wanted this information all in one place, updated automatically, without juggling multiple spreadsheets. That’s when we found our way to Cortex.”
Why Rapid7 chose Cortex
Rapid7 was looking to improve three key areas of operations that all lead to improved information discovery:
Accelerate migrations: Rapid7 wanted to ensure visibility not just across cloud environments, providers, and resources, but within those spaces as well. They needed to reduce time to find information and ensure alignment to ongoing standards of excellence or time bound initiatives like migrations.
Streamline incident response: While the team at Rapid7 had numerous security tools to ensure prompt identification of threats, they wanted to accelerate what came next. The team needed a faster path to understanding ownership, dependencies, and next steps.
Accelerate delivery timelines: Time spent hunting for information, context switching, and responding to threats was taking a toll on developer productivity, and time to market. Rapid7 wanted to reduce rote work for developers to help them get back to building high quality software.
Amanda sums up the core problem:
“Walk away from a spreadsheet for a minute, and it’s already stale, making program and software tracking really difficult, and noisy for developers. With Cortex, we never have that issue. I can just trust that information is always up to date, which is huge not just for me or other program managers, but for developer trust, everything is transparently tracked, and we can leave devs alone that have already done what they need to do.”
1. Accelerating migrations
With more than 1,000 engineers, maintaining alignment without slowing work is challenging, especially during large-scale changes like upgrading database instances.
“Ongoing maintenance, like addressing end-of-life initiatives, was draining both manager and developer time,” Elaine says.
When upgrading 3,000 RDS instances across multiple regions, Cortex identified the right owners, tracked progress in real time, and notified only affected developers with clear instructions and deadlines.
“We went from what would have been months of work to under two weeks,” Amanda says. “We could see exactly which instances were left and which teams were responsible.”
Elaine adds:
“Without Cortex, we might have missed an upgrade and caused an outage. Since Cortex pulls directly from resource metadata, we always have the most accurate information without distracting developers.”
2. Streamlining incident response
Cortex makes it easy for Rapid7 to quickly find information about incidents and vulnerabilities, and ensure that appropriate follow-up measures are executed in a timely fashion, even if the person on call doesn’t have a lot of historical context.
Amanda explains:
“When we have an incident, the person receiving the notification can head straight to Cortex to view everything they need to know. They can drill down into ownership, on-call, and dependencies, check recent events across all connected tools, and access ReadMes and runbooks, all from one page. This cuts response time significantly.”
She continues:
“If we had to do this manually, we’d need to rely on people at the company that have been there long enough to amass enough historical knowledge. That’s a common but problematic approach for lots of companies. Cortex automatically updates this information and enables us to house it in a central location everyone can access.”
3. Accelerating delivery timelines
Developer experience is a top priority for Amanda. That means reducing friction so engineers can focus on building.
She continues:
“Without Cortex, our time to deliver would be greatly slowed down by a couple weeks at least. Cortex allows us to move faster and more securely. Without it, we’re chasing down details during an incident, throughout a tool swap, or during day-to-day developer operations. There are all things which distract developers from building and shipping quickly. Now all these details are handed to us in a single place that’s always up to date.”
By eliminating repetitive manual work, Cortex keeps teams focused on delivering secure, high-quality software.
Scorecards that drive readiness
Rapid7 uses Cortex Scorecards to ensure critical initiatives stay on track:
RDS migrations – 3,000 multi-region RDS instances upgraded in under two weeks.
Vulnerability remediation – Tracks vulnerability volume and SLA compliance by severity, reducing the risk of missed fixes.
For Rapid7, readiness is non-negotiable. With Cortex, the engineering team has a single source of truth for ownership, system health, and operational priorities, allowing them to respond faster, migrate sooner, and deliver more securely.
“Cortex lets us keep developers focused on what they do best while ensuring our systems are always ready,” Amanda says.
For more information on how Cortex can help you drive alignment to standards of engineering excellence, take a tour today.
