How Collaboration.Ai Saved 2 Years and $2 Million with Chainguard, Second Front, and AWS

When Collaboration.Ai, a software and services company helping customers tackle complex challenges, set out to bring its CrowdVector solution marketplace and innovation management platform to the U.S. military and aerospace sectors, the team knew they’d be facing a steep climb. Gaining a FedRAMP Authority to Operate (ATO)—required for delivering software within the Department of Defense (DoD)—is a costly, time-consuming undertaking. But with the right partners, they found a faster, more secure way forward.

The Opportunity: Bringing CrowdVector to the Federal Market

For Collaboration.Ai, the opportunity to bring CrowdVector to the Department of Defense was clear. The platform could assist in overcoming hurdles like personnel recruitment and energy management while also supporting broader digital transformation goals across the Department of the Air Force, which serves more than 600,000 personnel. By making CrowdVector available to military and aerospace customers, the company saw a chance to drive meaningful innovation at scale.

The Challenge: Two Years in the ATO Trenches

For two years, Collaboration.Ai wrestled with the costly and bureaucratic journey of securing an ATO. The process was resource-draining—prompting the company’s leadership to rethink their approach and look for trusted partners who could help accelerate the path to compliance.

The Solution: Accelerated Accreditation by Partnering with Key Players 

To break through the bottlenecks of traditional ATO, Collaboration.Ai turned to Second Front’s Game Warden platform, built on AWS GovCloud. Game Warden offered a fully managed DevSecOps environment tailored to DoD compliance needs—and came with a key advantage: a reusable ATO that dramatically reduced the time and cost typically required for accreditation.

Also critical to long-term scalability was the introduction to Chainguard Containers. Through Game Warden, Collaboration.Ai began using a custom registry of secure, minimal container images from Chainguard—purpose-built to reduce vulnerabilities and decrease engineering and security toil. These hardened images enabled Collaboration.Ai’s engineering team to spend less time patching and more time building, accelerating product delivery without compromising on security.

Altogether, as Collaboration.Ai shared with the AWS team, the combination of Second Front, AWS, and Chainguard Containers helped Collaboration.Ai compress a two-year process into just 90 days, reduced vulnerabilities by 97%, and lowered compliance costs by $2 million. Most importantly, it set the company up for rapid growth in the federal space. “We’ve experienced exponential growth in both revenue and deployment opportunities,” said CEO Brennan Townley. “We have new visibility and are now better positioned to help the DoD achieve its goals of innovation and digital transformation.”

Security doesn’t have to slow you down. With the right partners, it can be a catalyst for speed, scale, and impact—especially in the most regulated environments.

Discover Chainguard Containers today, and reach out if you are interested in learning more about how we can help you achieve security and compliance goals.