GoTo expands the possibilities of remote work with OCI

Started in 2003, GoTo has become a global leader in remote working technology. From its cloud-based contact center and virtual event platform to its all-in-one IT management tools, the company aims to help people and businesses achieve unified communication from anywhere. Through its vast product and service portfolio, GoTo serves customers of all sizes and in all industries, totaling roughly 20 million users.

As a customer-centric company, GoTo prioritized a smooth communication experience for its users. When the pandemic hit, many organizations turned to remote technologies to keep their businesses running, resulting in a large spike in use of GoTo’s tools. Company leaders recognized that the existing hybrid infrastructure, consisting of AWS cloud services and on-premises data centers, would require a rapid shift to the cloud to meet the growing demand.

GoTo found it difficult to scale in its own data centers, which didn’t allow for on-demand flexibility to match variable workloads. The business also needed to operate with high levels of availability and security so customers could maintain operations without any disruption. In the same vein, GoTo needed to keep infrastructure in close proximity to all its global customers to ensure high performance and low latency for their remote communications.

Internally, leadership also emphasized the need for faster innovation and more automation capabilities to give engineers the tools they needed to develop new features for customers.

GoTo debated two paths: make do with its existing hybrid infrastructure, including on-premises data centers, or make an aggressive push to go all-in on the cloud. Ultimately, the growing customer demand and long-term benefits of a multicloud strategy sealed the deal and GoTo selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

The multicloud approach with OCI and AWS would allow the company to reap the benefits of different cloud services, provide greater reliability for customer workloads, and become more cost-efficient. OCI’s expansive network of public cloud regions would also allow GoTo to deploy resources near customers around the world, giving them the high performance they needed to operate in a robust, remote work environment.

Implementing a multicloud strategy is complex, so having OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE), with its open source standards, would be a massive advantage to automatically scale for dynamic workloads while offering compatibility with other cloud deployments.

GoTo’s implementation of OCI showed an immediate impact. By moving its core video technology and other services to OCI, the company improved performance for users, increased security, and scaled with efficiency to meet changes in capacity demand. GoTo now uses OCI to support 70% of its products.

The move out of its own data centers and into a multicloud environment with OCI helped to reduce concerns about availability, security, and performance. Even with the hike in demand seen during the pandemic, GoTo’s multicloud strategy enhanced resiliency of its critical workloads. The company improved its fault tolerance, while the common security model for identity and access management helped provide even further protection. Moreover, OCI’s global cloud regions allowed GoTo to deploy cloud resources close to customers in different geographies for high performance and low latency communication.

OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes was compatible with the remainder of GoTo’s cloud investments, allowing for easier infrastructure management. It also helped the company create a consistent approach for moving future workloads to the cloud. GoTo leaders saw OKE as a key differentiator of OCI, helping consolidate resources in Kubernetes clusters that scaled automatically for dynamic workloads. This approach also made for more predictable spend, balancing capacity as demand fluctuated.

The implementation of OCI also cut infrastructure costs by an average of 50%, with even higher savings for certain cloud services. More than just a financial gain, GoTo’s enhanced remote working landscape improved customer satisfaction—an essential win for a company heavily focused on its customers’ success.

Additionally, OCI gave GoTo’s developers more automation and better tooling, which made their lives easier and improved productivity. DevOps teams no longer had to handle manual upkeep of on-premises servers. The combined cloud capabilities within OCI and AWS created more room for innovation, an essential pillar of GoTo’s mission, and made employees feel rewarded for doing great work.