Miro Drives 500% Growth in Online Whiteboard Customers and Boosts Security Using AWS

The accelerated adoption of remote and hybrid working over the last 2 years brought about an unprecedented need for businesses to collaborate virtually. Miro was on the front line of this rapid change. It provides an online whiteboarding platform that allows teams to collaborate from wherever they are in the world. 

When employees were required to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Miro usage surged. Its user base grew by 500 percent to reach 30 million in January 2022. This includes both individual users and employees at its more than 130,000 paying customers, including 99 percent of the Fortune 100. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Miro drove this expansion and provided a reliable, speedy, and secure experience for its customers throughout the pandemic and beyond. 

Miro experienced steady and consistent growth for years before the COVID-19 pandemic began, as the popularity of its online whiteboards grew. But the Miro team never anticipated the boom it would see when the pandemic forced hundreds of millions of people into full-time remote work. User numbers doubled from 5 million in May 2020 to 10 million in November 2020.

Using AWS, Miro was prepared. “Our ability to manage the COVID-19 spike and continue to provide a quality experience for our customers would not have been possible without AWS,” says Brian Wehrle, software architect at Miro. “With a more rigid infrastructure or on-premises resources, it would have been simply impossible to scale that fast. We’re lucky to have completed our migration before the pandemic.”

To manage the rise in traffic, Miro used the autoscaling capabilities of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. To manage its expanding storage requirements, it used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

The ease of managing infrastructure using AWS means that Miro’s IT team spends less time on maintenance and can focus on high-level issues such as developing new features to please its growing audience. For instance, it launched a new feature called sticky clustering that makes it easy for users to organize large numbers of sticky notes they’re sharing on whiteboards so none goes missing.

For global teams to collaborate, large numbers of users must be able to simultaneously access the same online whiteboard. Miro’s virtual workspaces can accommodate anywhere from 1 to 1,000 users collaborating in real time.

To manage these multiple, concurrent requests and provide a responsive experience to encourage productive work sessions, Miro uses Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience.

Miro also caches static content such as webpage icons and images using Amazon CloudFront. “This optimizes load times and reduces the number of requests each virtual whiteboard must handle at one time, which results in a better customer experience,” says Wehrle.

Miro minimizes latency in workspaces by hosting content as close to users as possible, using AWS Regions and Availability Zones. Reducing the distance that content travels has cut the lag time between making a change to a whiteboard and team members seeing it from seconds to milliseconds.

Enterprise customers require rigorous security reviews before sharing corporate data on Miro. They also want assurances that they can easily comply with privacy regulations. “The reputation of AWS is really good,” says Wehrle. “It helps us to pass corporate security reviews. When we tell customers we use AWS, they know there’s a high level of protection for their data and our infrastructure.”

Miro uses Regions and Availability Zones to store copies of customers’ backed-up data, and Miro customers can encrypt their data using custom encryption keys that they control.

Miro also uses AWS to defend against cyberattacks. The IT team spots and prevents attempts by malicious users to penetrate its systems using AWS WAF – Web Application Firewall, which protects applications from common web exploits, and AWS Shield Advanced for managed distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection.

Using AWS, Miro automates network monitoring and takes advantage of machine learning to spot abnormal, malicious activity before it causes damage to its systems. Gaining access to a dedicated AWS security team in the US also relieves the pressure on Miro’s internal teams. “New threats are always appearing and having extra support from AWS helps us to better protect our systems with fewer resources,” says Wehrle.

Hybrid working is here to stay—and Miro is ready for it. “We’ve done a lot of research and we believe the future of the workplace is hybrid,” says Wehrle. “We’ll continue to work with some people in a meeting room at an office, some at home, and others in a satellite office in another city. That’s the world we’re developing Miro for. By leveraging AWS services, we are prepared for continued growth.”

Miro is building its infrastructure on AWS to handle whatever comes next. One priority is investing in further automation of development and testing environments that run on AWS, to speed up product development and stay ahead of customer trends and competitors.

All of Miro’s plans include AWS. “AWS knows our business, identifies where we need help, and makes meaningful suggestions for improvements,” says Wehrle. “Our account team has helped us to optimize our spend and architect new solutions. We know they’re always just a chat message or email away.”