Clear Software’s Highly Available AWS VPN Solution Serves Fortune 500s and Beyond

No matter the industry or job description, everyone who works has a handful of repetitive, tedious tasks they do almost every day—from generating reports to formatting data or closing out accounting invoices.

“Using business software can be clunky and cumbersome,” says Jon Gilman, founder and CEO of Clear Software. “We want to free people from that repetition so everyone can, frankly speaking, like their jobs better.”

With intelligent business tool automation, Clear Software can take a task that requires fifteen clicks to accomplish and reduce it to only one or two clicks. If a process takes days, Clear Software can automate it down to hours or minutes. This extra efficiency not only saves people time and money but empowers them to do more invigorating work.

Clear’s clients include several Fortune 500 companies, and as such, they have a very high bar for uptime and availability. Since 2017, they’ve been working together with Trek10 on the networking that powers their automation and the support infrastructure that guarantees maximum availability. Together, Clear Software and Trek10 laid the foundation for Clear’s entire VPN architecture, which handles very complex automation tasks across many client systems while providing a seamless end-user experience.

“The set-up for our serverless VPN architecture has made us more efficient and automated our processes as we scale, said David Galitsky, CTO of Clear Software. “Our own business is more seamless and less manual than it has ever been.”

Transitioning from Aviatrix to AWS VPN

To automate business software processes, Clear Software sets up VPNs for each client to interface directly with their respective on-prem business tools. Since 2018, Clear had been managing these VPNs with Aviatrix which, at the time, was the most featureful, performant VPN management software on the market. By 2020, however, other VPN solutions were becoming increasingly robust—with a much lower price tag.

“With some of the features that have come out on AWS VPN in the past year,” said Mike Norris, CloudOps Engineer at Trek10, “it became clear that AWS VPN would be a much more elegant, cost-effective solution for what Clear needed.”

Clear Software agreed and decided to make the switch. Transitioning to AWS VPN resulted in simplifying their VPN management, as everything could be deployed via CloudFormation—and it cost about one-tenth of the price, saving Clear thousands of dollars per month.

“Trek10 has really built us up for success,” said CEO Jon Gilman. “AWS changes very quickly, and thanks to Trek10 we were using many advantageous new features before most people even heard about them.”

Achieving Enterprise-grade Uptime and Availability

Clear Software works with some of the largest companies in the world and, as such, uptime is paramount. They use a wide range of monitoring and security tools, such as CloudSploit, to keep an eye on any potential issues or risk factors, even from the client’s infrastructure side. “We have peace of mind that if a customer’s network goes down,” said Galitsky, “we know before they do.”

Thanks to Trek10’s CloudOps 24x7 support, Clear Software can also rest assured that, if an issue does arise, they have additional resources to handle it as quickly as possible, even on weekends.

“The main thing that differentiates Trek10,” said Gilman, “is the fact that I can always talk to somebody quickly. Trek10 is very nimble and fast to respond to issues so we can provide the best possible experience for our clients.”

Continuous Automation Enrichment

Clear Software’s mission is to automate companies’ most tedious tasks so that employees can be more productive and creative. Clear holds themselves to the same standard and, as an engineering culture, has an eye for efficiency. Their next goal is to continue automating their own VPN solutions with serverless functions that make initial client set-up a less manual process for their own engineers.

“Being engineers, we’re always trying to be more efficient!” says Galitsky. “We want everyone on our platform to be as efficient as possible, too.”

“People get passionate about how much time we save them,” says Gilman. “It never gets old to hear feedback from a customer that we made their jobs so much easier.”