ZenMate is a Berlin-based company providing products and solutions in the domain of internet security and privacy. The firm delivers their VPN service to more than 40 million users worldwide (as of mid 2017). The core product ensures fast and secure internet access as well as enables the user to protect their IP and online behaviour by encrypting the user’s online traffic. The service also allows the user to change their virtual location, gain access to localized contents and download them privately, securely and at high speed. The service features and functionalities are particularly useful in geographies with censorship to bypass. The VPN also helps to secure Wi-Fi connections.

The client needed to augment their in-house team with devops engineers to take over the system infrastructure and manage it in a professional and reliable way. The engagement was temporary in nature and was to finish with the onboarding of new permanent hires to take over the roles and responsibilities involved.

All in all, the collaboration with the client could be divided into three stages. In the preliminary two-week phase, SoftKraft engineers were collocated to work with the client team on-site in Berlin, which ensured efficient kick-off and onboarding.

While delivering the service the engineers engaged - among other things - maintained the existing system infrastructure, developed the system features pending in the backlog, added new features to reduce client VPN service delivery cost as well as improve the service itself. All in all, the service delivered was geared towards maintaining the infrastructure as well as making it more durable and more performant.

In the final stage of collaboration, SoftKraft’s job was to support the smooth onboarding of a new devops engineer to take over the job on a permanent basis. During the final stage the engineers again collocated with the client to ensure broadband communications and effective takeover of the devops function.