How KnowBe4 Automated Their Way to Quality Driven Deployments

The Challenge

Fishing for Better DevOps Days‍

Security is serious business. Just ask KnowBe4.

‍As a leader in security awareness training and human risk management, KnowBe4 empowers organizations to protect themselves against security threats through simulated phishing and comprehensive security awareness training. The company has relied on Salesforce as its core platform since its inception, with the platform serving as the backbone for both sales and service operations. Today, approximately 2,000 employees across KnowBe4 utilize Salesforce to deliver critical security awareness solutions to their customers.

"Salesforce is definitely the largest of our enterprise applications," explains Adam Johnson, Sr. Director of Delivery & Quality at KnowBe4. "Our sales and service teams use Sales Cloud and Service Cloud on a daily basis."

Despite their sophisticated use of Salesforce, KnowBe4's development and deployment processes weren't keeping pace with their growth. With no real DevOps practice in place, they started experiencing significant challenges in their release management process. Simple updates to page layouts became incredibly complex, especially on objects like Opportunities and Accounts.

Their sandbox strategy was also problematic. Developers spun up environments at will, leaving sandboxes hanging around for months, sometimes years. Trying to reconcile changes between outdated environments and production became a nightmare.

The pattern was clear. Problems would interrupt planned releases. "The team is really committed to doing good work," explains Adam Johnson, Sr. Director of Delivery & Quality. "They routinely stepped up, but asking them to work late hours and weekends was not something that you want to have to do."

Teams worked late hours and weekends to get deployments through. A "rock star" culture emerged, praising those who saved the day. But as Adam notes, "that takes a toll eventually, if you're having to do that regularly."
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The Solution

A Security-First Strategy for DevOps

After evaluating numerous DevOps solutions, KnowBe4 chose Copado for its mature feature set and seamless integration with their existing processes. "We looked at about 10-15 different options in the market," says Johnson. "For most of them, after reviewing a few YouTube videos and seeing screenshots of the applications, I realized they weren't mature enough solutions. Copado is a very mature solution."

The team particularly valued Copado's ability to handle complex metadata deployments and its integrated approach to CPQ data migration. "Copado allows the data deployer to sit right with the DevOps. You can actually add deployment steps on a user story, so you're just doing it one time, and it follows all the way up the pipeline," Johnson explains.

But getting the right DevOps process took guidance. The team worked with Copado's Professional Services team for 2-3 months to brainstorm what they wanted, needed, and how to tackle the short term and long term vision. How many sandboxes did they need? What refresh cycles? Shared environments or individual ones? Professional Services worked with the KnowBe4 team to set up what was right for their team.
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The Outcome

Securing Peace of Mind

Copado was a game-changer. The conflict resolution feature was a dream. Every piece of metadata on a user story now shows its status. "It takes just a couple of clicks to see what everyone else is doing," Adam notes. Their CPQ deployments were transformed. Gone were the days of manually updating production records and hoping for the best. Now the KnowBe4 team could move configuration changes and data together.

They even found a solution to their unique training environment challenge. With new hires spending 1-2 weeks in training, they couldn't refresh environments and wipe student data. Copado's CI tool stepped in, automatically syncing production changes while preserving training records.

KnowBe4's new DevOps practice was delivering significant measurable improvements:

Deployment velocity soared. Building a change once and watching it flow through the pipeline became the new normal. "Anytime something reaches production, it goes to our hotfix environment to keep perfect parity with production," Johnson notes.

Now the team can see potential conflicts right on their screen. Every piece of metadata. Every user story. All connected. No more rebuilding Change Sets in every environment. No more dependency headaches. Just click and go. Now the team has time for building, innovating, and leading.
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The Future

Training AI to Be Security-Smart

Through their partnership with Copado, KnowBe4 has not only transformed their DevOps practices but positioned themselves to take advantage of the next wave of innovation in software development.

KnowBe4 is now looking to the future with Copado's AI capabilities. The team sees tremendous potential in using AI to further streamline their development process.

"If you're not doing AI right now, you're at a disadvantage," Adam observes. "We want to be able to gain that productivity. We want that power in the hands of our users today."
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