Up and to the right

Diminishing returns

Like all modern businesses, TMX Group needed to digitize its operations across its various holdings to remain competitive within the market and profitable. The company wanted to streamline its operations, improve data analytics capabilities, and reduce operating costs by moving more of its core operations to the cloud. But diverse business objectives and a mix of legacy and cloud infrastructure made it difficult for the company's cloud technology team to align the talent and resources needed to put all those plans in action.

"We weren't fully realizing the efficiencies and subsequent benefits we expected from our cloud operations. Different groups across our organization brought diverse skills, experiences, and philosophies with respect to cloud technology," says Mark Salam, TMX Group's Director of Cloud Technology. "We realized that we needed a way to standardize our deployment methodology and infrastructure management by automating provisioning across all our products and services."

Misaligned philosophies lead to inefficiencies and increased costs

TMX Group operates a number of small, dedicated teams focused on a range of data analytics subscription services, venture exchanges, and other web properties aimed at monetizing the firm's expansive, proprietary data stores.

"Every one of our line-of-business teams has unique objectives and respective strategies for how to achieve them," Salam says. "but often these approaches didn't fully align, which spread our team thin and impacted efficiencies due to the additional time and effort dedicated to making everything work to deliver on time."

In response, Salam's team sought to simplify the firm's cloud infrastructure provisioning using native provisioning tools. "At first glance, the native toolset seemed like a great option because it is designed specifically for our preferred cloud environment," says Ryan McCaul, the cloud architecture and automation lead at TMX Group. "Over time we discovered that we needed something more module friendly that would allow us to build reusable modules that were pre-approved for our security and infrastructure guidelines and that we could share with developers who could use it without a lot of training or ramp up time."

Safe, secure, and transparent automation now and in the future

Salam says that in addition to automating complex infrastructure deployments, the use of Terraform and Vault has also dramatically improved the company's governance practices by automating access key rotation within its existing environment.

"We used to manage access keys manually by rotating and recycling them periodically, which was a tedious exercise " he says. "With Terraform, we can automatically configure and populate Vault so end users can manage their own access keys without our help, which has shortened the entire process considerably."

Both Salam and McCaul anticipate HashiCorp to play an increasingly central role in TMX Group's operations in the future. Eventually, TMX Group intends to use Sentinel's embedded policy-as-code framework to help with security, compliance and management of operational consistency across the business.

In addition to provisioning with Sentinel, building out an image pipeline with HashiCorp Packer and simplifying service discovery with HashiCorp Consul, the team hopes to extend the HashiCorp solutions to other less cloud-heavy areas of the business.

"The vision with tools like Terraform and Vault isn't unique to cloud," McCaul says. "The technology is so flexible and applicable to other areas of our business that we're eager to share our learnings with colleagues across the organization and roll out common tools that will position us all for sustained success for years to come."