Enabling Millions of Daily Automated Compliance Checks Across Intuit

Intuit has a comprehensive Automated Compliance Platform (ACP), which ensures the company’s applications and resources are secure and compliant. As Intuit continues to grow and serve more customers, it looks to increase its platform capabilities while reducing outages and performance problems.

That’s why Intuit turned to MongoDB Atlas, the developer data platform, to scale ACP performance. MongoDB Atlas provides double the performance, compared to Intuit’s previous solution, at a lower cost, and enables real-time visibility of operations to drive greater return on investment. Using the integrated Business Intelligence (BI) Connector, Intuit is also able to use its preferred BI tools to access MongoDB data directly and integrate external dashboarding.

Intuit is the global technology platform that helps consumers and small businesses overcome their most important financial challenges. Through products such as TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp, the company serves more than 100 million customers worldwide, saving them time and money while giving them confidence in their financial decisions.

As the company migrated its systems onto the public cloud, Intuit faced new challenges when it began to rely on its own development teams for security compliance on a number of public cloud accounts.

“The move to the public cloud has changed compliance evaluations and evidence collection dramatically, which is why we developed our own Automated Compliance Platform,” says Matt Gravlin, Principal Software Engineer, Intuit. ”ACP evaluates hundreds of unique checks across cloud and non-cloud resources, generating millions of evaluation results per day.”

While ACP advanced Intuit’s platforms, the technology teams continued to look for a document database solution that could match the level of performance, scalability, and flexibility the company needed. The team searched the market for a solution, leading them to MongoDB.

“We have a strong culture of innovation at Intuit and twice a year we host an internal event called Global Engineering Days (GED), which gives our engineers a dedicated week to innovate and experiment with new projects,” says Gravlin. “MongoDB Atlas was at the top of our exploration list for GED in 2022.”

Gravlin’s team successfully migrated their development environment to MongoDB Atlas within that week, and to production soon after. With the Atlas platform in place, it was simply a matter of pointing the data streams to a different endpoint. Atlas instantly brought new functionality, such as real-time monitoring, as well as integration with the QlikSense Business Intelligence Connector. Intuit also began using MongoDB Charts to visualize the data and metrics.

“The migration was incredibly easy and only required a switch of the endpoint to the new MongoDB Cluster, so we were in full production within a week,” says Barry Ruffner, Senior Software Engineer, Intuit. “We created a list of all features we were looking for with the migration, and we successfully implemented them with minimal development time.”

Intuit’s goals for ACP are to: demonstrate continuous compliance at any point within the software development and infrastructure lifecycle; identify risk to non-compliance early on; and simplify transparent measurement of controls across Intuit. MongoDB not only helped Intuit achieve these objectives, but also saved thousands of labor hours along the way.

Intuit now enjoys double the performance with a smaller footprint, and greater ROI with lower costs. Previously, input /output (IO) accounted for up to 70% of costs. With MongoDB Atlas, IO is no longer a factor. In addition to dramatically reducing IO costs, Intuit has been able to multiply the speed at which ACP functions and provide more usability for its technologists.

Additionally, Intuit receives real-time, full statistics on the database, the CPU, the memory, and disk. Where it might have taken two days to kick off an index before, it can now be completed in less than an hour. The time it takes Intuit to complete compliance audits has also been reduced significantly, with the months-long process cut down to mere days using MongoDB Atlas.

“With MongoDB Atlas integrated into ACP, our compliance subject matter expert community is much better prepared for audits, and has reduced audit preparation time from months down to only eleven days,” says David Grant, Compliance Engineering Group Manager.

Concurrently, Intuit now has access to a wealth of data via Atlas, Charts, and the BI Connector, which are aggregated into multiple customized ACP dashboards. If any issues arise, they can be resolved quickly and without disruption to the business, as MongoDB is fully managed as well. Looking forward, the company is exploring the possible use of MongoDB Atlas Triggers for alerts and the MongoDB Atlas GraphQL API for access to data stored in a MongoDB cluster.

“ Now ACP is one of the highest-ranking products internally,” says Gravlin. “MongoDB has helped us transform how we automate security compliance in the cloud, and has gone a long way to making the process effortless.”

Matt Gravlin, Principal Software Engineer, Intuit