UBIQ Education delivers a school website platform, helping schools worldwide deliver personalized experiences. The company serves hundreds of institutions across multiple regions. It onboards 10–20 new schools every month and deploys workloads across dozens of Azure regions. This ensures reliable, local delivery at scale.
UBIQ Challenge: Scaling Cloud Operations While Staying Compliant
As UBIQ’s customer base expanded, its cloud operations struggled to keep pace. The company initially used Terraform Cloud (TFC) but quickly hit limitations around environment separation, stack flexibility, and private agent pricing. The initial infrastructure was set up manually by developers. This created a ClickOps culture. As a result, there was Terraform drift, compliance gaps, and long deployment cycles.
Provisioning each new school site required 4 people in the loop. This added overhead and slowed a process that needed to keep pace with UBIQ’s rapid global growth.
At that point, Ed Haynes joined UBIQ as Principal Platform Engineer. He has over 15 years of experience in infrastructure roles. Ed worked at Lloyds Banking Group and Landmark Information. He has strong skills in Azure and Terraform. He understood that the company needed a scalable model for its growth.
The Results – Provisioning at Scale
Provisioning at Scale
With ControlMonkey, UBIQ transformed its cloud operations. Provisioning effort dropped by 75% – from four people to one. By removing handoffs between teams, UBIQ cut overhead and reduced ticketing. Developers gained more time to focus on innovation instead of repetitive provisioning tasks.
ControlMonkey’s auto-stack creation ensured new environments could be spun up instantly. Moreover, the Azure DevOps PR integration provided contextual feedback. This helped reduce provisioning time and back-and-forth code reviews.
Providing such robust automation also eliminated ClickOps. Engineers felt more confident provisioning and updating infrastructure through Terraform. They no longer needed to bypass the golden pattern by using the Azure console.
UBIQ SOC 2 Compliance Gains
ControlMonkey also strengthened compliance. Before, manual provisioning and drift incidents made it harder and slower. It was difficult to keep up with SOC 2 requirements, especially around encryption defaults and public-facing configurations. Through policy enforcement, Ed established rules to maintain a zero-tolerance approach for secrets and API keys in production. Additionally, drift detection promptly identified any misconfigurations.
The result: Achieving a 100% SOC 2 compliance acceptance rate in the infrastructure delivery process. This gave the company confidence to scale securely without losing agility.
"We achieved a 100% SOC 2 compliance acceptance rate, particularly around encryption and the security pillar of SOC 2. Compliance is now built into our infrastructure delivery process and proactively enforced, giving us confidence that issues are addressed before they ever reach production"
Migration off Terraform Cloud
Ubiq decided to migrate from Terraform Cloud after seeing ControlMonkey in action. They realized the benefits of an IaC platform that supports infrastructure delivery, AI-powered Terraform code generation, and cloud integration beyond the code.
Migration from Terraform Cloud took just 1 day thanks to ControlMonkey’s automated migration tool.
Next phase: Self-service Terraform templates for non-tech users
With provisioning streamlined and compliance risks eliminated, Ed is now focusing on taking automation even further. UBIQ plans to adopt ControlMonkey’s self-service templates, which will allow non-technical teams to provision new customer environments without engineering involvement.
This next step will extend automation beyond DevOps. It will further reduce overhead and enable faster business growth. It will help UBIQ onboard 10 to 20 new schools each month without the cloud operations team becoming a bottleneck or slowing down the business.
"We’ve taken the number of people required to be involved in provisioning a new site from four down to one. That efficiency means more time for innovation, less ticketing, and more productivity overall"
Author
