Kertos is a compliance automation platform that helps a wide variety of European startups and scaleups comply with critical security frameworks—including SOC2, GDPR, ISO 27001, and many more.

To help their customers establish and maintain compliance with these frameworks, Kertos needed to build ticketing and HRIS integrations that could streamline key security workflows. 

The process of building and maintaining these integrations in-house, however, wasn’t an option.

According to Alex Prams, Kertos’ CTO:

“Some of our competitors offered 100+ ticketing and HRIS integrations and the only thing we needed to do to catch up was match their integration offerings. We found that building these integrations in-house would take our team more than a year, so this approach was off the table.”

As their team evaluated different integration solutions, they ultimately chose between Merge and Kombo. 

Alex explains why they went with the former:

The team at Kertos only needed a few weeks to build to Merge’s Unified API “thanks to Merge’s comprehensive and clear documentation and their incredibly responsive and knowledgeable support team,” says Alex.

Here’s how their HRIS integrations work:

1. Once logged in, a customer can select the specific HRIS integration they’re interested in.

2. This triggers Merge Link—a UI component—to appear. The user can simply follow the prompts to authenticate their integration. 

3. Once authenticated, various employee fields are populated in Kertos—full names, job titles, departments, addresses, etc.—and are resynced in real-time through third-party webhooks.

This sync powers two key use cases for their customers: 

• New hires will automatically receive certain task assignments in Kertos. Also, as employees reach milestones in their tenure (e.g., 1 year anniversary), Kertos can automatically identify and assign relevant trainings

• Once employees leave, Kertos creates the relevant set of offboarding tasks that need to be completed (e.g., de-provisioning the former employee’s access to applications). Also, tasks get created to reassign activities/areas of ownership from employees who’ve left 

In the case of their ticketing integrations, users would follow the same process to authenticate the connections.

Once authenticated, specific ticketing data would initially be added to Kertos (names, descriptions, due dates, statuses, attachments, etc.) and get re-synced bidirectionally in real-time via third-party webhooks.

This powers a few key workflows for Kertos’ customers:

• Any tasks identified for a security framework in Kertos leads to a corresponding ticket getting created in a customer’s ticketing system—enabling the customer to discover and complete the task quickly

• Any attachments uploaded to a task in the ticketing tool are automatically added to the associated task in Kertos. Customers can use this as evidence that they comply with a certain part of a security framework

• Once a task gets completed from a customer’s ticketing tool, Kertos automatically updates how close the customer is to complying with the associated security framework

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The process of building each ticketing and HRIS integration would, according to Alex’s estimate, take one of their engineers 40 hours, on average. Since they needed to build more than 100 integrations, this would come out to nearly 2 years of time for one of their engineers.

With Merge, Kertos only needed 2 weeks to launch all of these integrations, so they’ve been able to launch integrations 50x faster through Merge.

The benefits of outsourcing integration maintenance to Merge have been just as critical:

“Each integration would take one of our engineers roughly 8 hours per year to maintain. Since Merge handles this work on our behalf across the 100+ integrations they support for us, our engineers can save roughly 1,000 hours every year on integration maintenance,” explains Alex.

As a compliance solution, Alex and his team also appreciate how secure Merge’s integrations are.

We look forward to supporting Kertos' integration needs in the years to come.