Can you introduce yourselves and your roles at GEA Digital?

Marc Lehr, Head of Customer Engagement & Digital Platform: I’m responsible for leading the Portal & App Factory developer team at GEA Digital. My role is to ensure that our development is not only innovative, but also secure. With today’s pace of change (new dependencies, countless libraries, and ever-shifting threats) we need automated security scanning to keep up.

Salvatore Cuccurullo, Senior DevOps Manager: I oversee our cloud infrastructure and help automate processes for both our developers and operations teams. In practice, this means making sure our teams can deliver quickly while staying compliant and secure.

What challenges did you face before Aikido?

Salvatore: In my previous experience, I had worked with other tools like Trivy Scanner. While it was solid, it required heavy integration effort and constant maintenance to stay up to date. That simply didn’t scale for us.

Marc: We needed a solution that fit seamlessly into our CI/CD setup, so something we could get running fast without requiring every developer to be a DevOps expert. Security should empower development, not slow it down.

Why did you choose Aikido?

Salvatore: “We actually think of Aikido as a third team in our DevOps structure. Developers focus on building, operations handle infrastructure, and Aikido takes care of security in the background.”

Marc: “Aikido immediately stood out because it was truly built with developers in mind. The UX is simple, clean, and removes unnecessary friction.”

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“Aikido immediately stood out because it was truly built with developers in mind. The UX is simple, clean, and removes unnecessary friction.”‍

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Some key reasons we chose Aikido:

• Fast onboarding: “In just 45 minutes of internal training, we were able to onboard more than 150 developers.”
  
• Agile updates: Aikido ships features continuously, keeping pace with our needs.
  
• Support where we work: “The built-in chat makes it easy for our decentralized teams to ask questions and get immediate answers.”

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“In just 45 minutes of internal training, we were able to onboard more than 150 developers.”

Which Aikido features do you find most valuable?

“Our record so far was resolving a vulnerability in five minutes from detection to fix with AI AutoFix.”

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Marc: “The Aikido refined feature is a game-changer. It automatically filters out false positives, saving developers from chasing noise.” I also love AI AutoFix. When I see a critical issue, I check if it’s eligible for an auto fix. If it is, I trigger it, notify the developer, and within minutes the issue can be merged. Our record so far was resolving a vulnerability in five minutes from detection to fix.

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Salvatore: “Aikido is perfectly integrated with our CI/CD tool, like Azure DevOps. Even if someone has zero DevOps experience, they can start being productive in a few clicks.”

Can you share your experience with Aikido’s penetration testing?

Marc: We recently ran a pentest through Aikido and were very happy with the results. Because it leverages the security scanning data from within Aikido, the process was more efficient. The effort, time, and cost were all significantly reduced compared to traditional approaches.

What advice would you give to teams evaluating Aikido?

Marc: Involve your developers from day one. Aikido offers a ton of integrations and automations, but the smaller features are often what make the biggest difference.

Salvatore: Don’t underestimate the impact of how seamlessly it integrates with your tools (like Azure DevOps, in our case). Aikido made it possible for us to achieve strong security with minimal disruption to daily work.