Security and compliance are vital to earning and maintaining the trust and integrity of individuals and organizations. Drata makes compliance easy, by using automation to enable continuous control monitoring and streamline traditionally manual and time-intensive steps like evidence collection to ensure audit readiness. 

Drata ran into a challenge at its inception: since their customers use different platforms, they had to quickly offer a wide range of integrations with cloud services, developer tools, HRIS, ticketing, device management, and more to successfully automate their compliance processes.

Daniel Marashlian, Drata’s Co-Founder and CTO, explained how they tried building their own integrations at first. “Since we were automating compliance posture on our own tools, such as Jira and AWS, we needed to gather evidence from metadata APIs — how people are using the systems. As the product grew and customer needs expanded, it quickly became complex with all the different platforms our customers use. Then when it came to building HR systems, we quickly realized how fragmented it is compared to the infrastructure vertical.”

The Drata team built Gusto as their first HR integration. Once finished, their next customer needed Rippling: “It was the same process, go talk to their team, figure out their API. It was taking a lot of time. And then before we knew it, there was a laundry list of HR integrations being requested for our prospects and customers.”

Daniel was determined to find an easier way to do this, as it wasn’t sustainable to build and maintain integrations individually. He was searching for a solution that was “one to many”. He found Merge and felt that it was built specifically for Drata’s integration needs.

When assessing options, Drata was focused on finding a solution that was proven and consistent. Downtime and bad data would result in customers violating their audit window — unacceptable results for a customer-facing enterprise experience.

Drata ultimately felt that Merge was the perfect partner for them, not only because of Merge’s technology, but also Merge’s drive and pace compared to other options. 

Within two weeks, the team was able to build and test Merge’s Unified API for HRIS. Drata’s initial HR integration with Gusto, which they built in-house, took months.

With Merge, Drata saved multiple weeks of developer time per integration. It’s now as simple as going into the Merge interface and flipping a switch to turn on an HR integration for their customers.

As Drata’s customer needs expanded, Merge was able to meet them with new categories and features. Drata soon had to offer directory platform integrations, such as Ping Identity and OneLogin, so their customers could sync user data and their levels of access. Part of compliance is validating that users have multi-factor authentication (MFA). MFA is a custom field that Drata was able to access and normalize across all their directory integrations using Merge’s “Field Mapping'' feature.

Drata also turned to Merge to support more complex ticketing use cases such as bidirectional ticket syncing and creating tickets and more advanced filters. Daniel felt confident in using Merge for the ticketing category: “We’ve already invested in a partnership with Merge and it’s proven to work. Merge offers integrations with 30+ ticketing platforms. We started with Asana and ServiceNow to test and build it out with Merge to full capacity...it worked so now we can extend it out across all the ticketing systems.”

But Merge isn’t just a Unified API product. Merge is an integration platform to also manage customer integrations. With over 700 linked accounts, it can be challenging to have full visibility and control into every single one and proactively identify any customer issues. 

Harrison Krat is the Director of Solutions Architecture, managing the Solutions Architect and Technical Support teams. Harrison’s teams are able to utilize the Merge Dashboard on a daily basis to troubleshoot any customer issues such as expired credentials. In particular, Issues and Logs allow Drata’s support team to be self-sufficient in their investigations and communications with their customers.

“It’s really easy for us to show our customers exactly what we’re seeing and what data is coming through and why or why not it is matching in their system. Then it’s super easy to arrive at the particular remediation.”

Managing integrations is challenging and can be more time consuming than building an integration, which is why Merge is focused on building a robust, full suite of Integrations Management features.

Today, Drata is able to offer over 30 integrations as part of their product across HRIS, directory, and ticketing. These integrations have helped unlock additional sales since Drata can now close prospects who requested certain integrations in just a few weeks.

Drata increases customer value by offering these integrations and showcasing the automation that these integrations bring to Drata’s product.

Merge’s Integrations Management features have also increased Drata’s customer satisfaction and retention. With the Merge Dashboard, Drata has spent 80% less time managing their customers’ integrations.

Support engineers don’t need to chase down any missing data or even look at complex code to understand what is happening. Logs and Issues lay it out clearly. “It takes my team a matter of an hour or less (to identify and address integration issues) using the Merge Dashboard. Previously, it may take them up to 5 hours.,” says Harrison. “Even more important, we now have 100% confidence when we come to a customer with a proposed solution.”

Drata feels they’ve found the right partner with Merge at the start of their integration journey and has experienced proven growth and success: “We’ve loved working with Merge and this partnership has been invaluable.”