Wickr Enterprise has just gotten even better! Wickr just released a major update that includes an exciting integration with our key technology partner – Replicated. Together, this release brings a slew of new features to enterprise IT admins. We’ve made deployments much easier – with several key enhancements along the lines of installation, scalability, updates, change management, and supportability features. These features have been added all while continuing to preserve the absolute privacy and restricted access to the Wickr Enterprise instances.The installation process offers >10x reduction in deployment time and is now as simple as running a single install command on each server that is to be part of the Wickr cluster. The installer will automatically verify that the environment meets all of the standard requirements and surface any potential mismatches immediately. From there, IT admins can easily customize their deployment through a variety of settings and configuration options. To prevent misconfiguration, Wickr Enterprise now leverages advanced validation to ensure the authenticity of TLS certificates, credentials, and the general uniformity of data.
To achieve horizontal scalability, IT admins can easily add additional hosts during the setup process in anticipation of increased load or to move towards an HA setup. The same 1-line install and environment verification will be performed against every host that is added to the cluster to ensure a properly configured and provisioned environment.
We understand that not all deployments are the same – self-hosted in Cloud, On-premise and even air-gapped environments – Wickr Enterprise using Replicated supports each, and the container-level update process is remarkably similar. For Cloud Self-hosted installs, the Replicated admin console will make outbound requests to determine if a new Wickr Enterprise version is available. If it is, the update will be downloaded where it is ready for install with a single click. For air-gapped environments, the same processes are monitoring a local directory where IT admins can sneakernet a single `.airgap` package for delivery. In either scenario, once update packages have made it securely to the environment, IT admins are able to snapshot the system (for storage locally, in S3 on an SFTP server). This can serve as a fallback in the event of a failed update, or it can be used to restore onto a canary server as part of a detailed change management process. Once an update has been staged via a restore, the update will be applied and validated through predefined user acceptance testing. After all checks have been completed, the update can be applied to the production cluster, validated, and the staging environment can be removed.
Finally, in the event of a complication, Wickr Enterprise now includes the ability to automatically generate a Support Bundle. The Support Bundle collects a variety of important logs, metrics, and metadata about the instance that will enable our team to more easily troubleshoot. All information is processed through a redaction phase that will remove pre-identified sensitive fields. Additionally, the plain-text nature of these files allows them to be processed through an external Data Loss Prevention tool to give further assurance to enterprises about the data being shared with the Wickr team.
Wickr has always been the most secure way to facilitate inter-team communication and collaboration, and adding the Replicated relationship and integration make it the easiest to install and maintain as a full private instance (i.e. in your data center or VPC). Want to learn more? Reach out to wickr-sales@amazon.com to experience SaaS simplicity with an Enterprise deploy!
Grant Miller, CEO Replicated
Randy Brumfield, VP Corp Dev & Customer Success