Introduction
For more than 25 years, STOXX has provided the indices that power global financial markets. Following its 2024 split from Qontigo and merger with Institutional Shareholder Services to form ISS STOXX, the company needed an engineering foundation that could match the reliability and transparency its indices provide to markets.
After STOXX formed a new engineering team, it began working under a clear mandate to build a new, modern operating model for the company. The team invested in a suite of best-in-class tools to support this mission. While each tool was powerful on its own, the lack of a central hub created friction for developers and made it difficult for leadership to get a clear picture of the engineering organization.
With Cortex, STOXX was able to create a single source of truth that unified their tools, automated service onboarding, and established a foundation for continuous compliance.
Key results:
Unified several best-in-class tools into a single pane of glass for engineering.
Eliminated developer friction by providing direct access to critical data from tools like SonarQube and Wiz.
Established a foundation for continuous compliance and enterprise-wide reporting for leadership.
Drastically reduced the time required to onboard new services and teams.
Challenge: A powerful but disconnected toolchain
As the head of Platform Engineering, SRE, and Cloud Security, Mit Saru was tasked with building the company's engineering foundation from the ground up. His team selected powerful, well-known tools for infrastructure, CI/CD, and security. However, this created a new problem.
"Our company is full of big brand name tools that we've brought in that everyone's proud of, but nothing glued them together before we got Cortex." – Mit Saru, Head of Platform Engineering, SRE, and Cloud Security, STOXX
This lack of a central system meant that critical engineering tasks were slow and manual. Setting up a new application required engineers to manually create GitHub repos and configure groups, a process that could take weeks. Information was siloed, forcing developers to navigate complex logins to access data from different systems.
"We had an on-premises SonarQube instance that was blocking a bunch of builds," says Mit. "Engineers had to go through six login screens of various different VPNs and remote sessions just to be able to see what the issue was." This friction was a significant obstacle to continuous delivery at a critical time for refactoring new applications.
Solution: A single pane of glass for engineering
STOXX needed a solution that could integrate with their existing toolchain and provide the "glue" that was missing. They found that Cortex had the most ready-made integrations, which was a critical factor for their small team.
"That's a big deal for us because we're a small team," Mit notes. "Now we've got almost all of them set up and we're pulling all of the data in."
By integrating their tools with Cortex, the platform team was able to create a single, unified view of their services. One of the first wins was piping data from the on-premises SonarQube instance directly into Cortex. This allowed developers to see build issues instantly without the painful login process.
"We pulled that data into Cortex so that they could just see what it was directly," Mit says. "It saved them so much hassle."
Results: Driving efficiency, compliance, and developer enablement
With Cortex as their central hub, STOXX has transformed its engineering operations. The platform is now a key enabler for the entire engineering organization.
Cortex provides a foundation for continuous compliance, allowing STOXX to track service health and standards automatically. It also delivers a new level of visibility for leadership. "I'm able to go to my boss and say, 'Hey, I've got your enterprise reporting right here,'" says Mit.
Most importantly, Cortex has empowered STOXX's engineers by removing friction and giving them the information they need to do their best work.
"It's an enabling platform," says Mit. "I've always been the kind of person who likes to help people."
