Founded in 1991, onShore Security is among a handful of American cybersecurity firms, offering 24/7 real-time monitoring, correlation, and organization-wide network data analysis. Located in Chicago, they currently have 30 employees, all of them working remotely.
Their superb proprietary technology, enabled Onshore to be trusted by banks and large institutions from the US to achieve an end-to-end security view via Cybersecurity Consulting and Managed Security Solutions.
Challenge
Before Rocket.Chat, onShore had invested in an instant messaging tool based on the XMPP protocol. They hoped it would support company growth by facilitating their daily communications. However, they soon realized the flaw with XMPP tools: there was no established way to store and protect data to persist, which was tremendously counter-productive.
Teams would easily lose chat history and data, ending up being overwhelmed with extra work and concerns about organizational processes. Being experts in security and technology, onShore’s leadership soon started searching for a new platform with two non-negotiable features:
- On-premise hosting, which eliminated Slack and proprietary-source tools.
- Being open-source with a strong community and commercial support.
Results
Choosing Rocket.Chat was a no-brainer for Onshore because it was an open-source, community-supported platform with commercial support. After implementing Rocket.Chat, issues with data persistence were quickly solved, said Stel, Onshore’s CEO, “Rocket.Chat has a full history persistence on the server-side.”
The fact that Rocket.Chat had an on-premise installation (self-managed) was also crucial to onShore, since handling sensitive information is a regular part of their routines. “Knowing it’s secure means that we can have conversations in there!” said Josh, Marketing Manager at onShore. And “because it’s on-prem and we know it’s a secure communication platform, it gives us a secure channel”.
Managing past information, projects and people altogether
Before Rocket.Chat, email was onShore’s primary communication channel. However, the leadership was frustrated. They had “zero confidence that people would see emails and not ignore it because they just had so much work to be done”. As soon Rocket.Chat was tested, people quickly adopted the hub and started to “live in it”. In a few months, the daily communications moved from email to be entirely within Rocket.Chat, a “so compelling platform, that nowadays our entire company lives in there”, said Stel.
With numerous engineering tasks being handled simultaneously, onShore turned Rocket.Chat into a powerful workplace to centralize information about status, plans, and quickly discuss all sorts of technical details. Engineers and analysts “don’t have to worry about missing something because they can always use chat history to catch up on previous information”.
Quickly video interactions via Jitsi & Zoom
As the pandemic took place, video calls became the norm at Onshore. The integrations with both Zoom and Jitsi are their favorite ones. “You click a button and fire up Jitsi. It’s kickass, you just like decide: let’s meet now, boom, click, we’re in a meeting. Video! I love that.” said Stel. Thanks to these integrations, the team didn’t feel the need to use phones, which ultimately increased their security when having online interactions.
DevOps automation boosting HR processes
Even the HR team improved its productivity by linking Rocket.Chat to Bamboo HR, an HR software meant to facilitate team member onboarding and management. The automation allows onShore to receive constant updates about employees, e.g. who was on vacation during a certain week. All of it inside a single platform: Rocket.Chat.
