The crisis: When P1 incidents turn into treasure hunts
In 2025, ZoomInfo's engineering teams faced a familiar problem: rapid cloud growth had outpaced their ability to track cloud resource definitions — and team ownership. As their infrastructure expanded across multiple cloud accounts, what started as organized systems became a mess of resources with little accountability across the team.
The ZoomInfo team already used Spotify’s Backstage as their developer portal for managing services and documentation, so the next best step was a solution that integrated and met them where they were.
How to win the ZoomInfo way? Meet developers where they already work
Here's where ZoomInfo made a smart call. Instead of introducing another dashboard for their team to learn, they realized the solution needed to live inside Backstage: their existing developer portal where teams already managed services and documentation.
Enter Firefly's Backstage Plugin. Instead of forcing their team to context-switch between tools, the integration would bring comprehensive cloud visibility directly into their existing workflow. According to De-Swaan, the impact has already been major.
“Integrating Firefly has given us a reliable way to get all our developer-owned cloud assets into a single view, which is the essential first step for improving maintenance and scalability.”
Firefly scans ZoomInfo's cloud environment, and the plugin digests that information. It then populates their Backstage catalog with real infrastructure data, and correlates every resource with the development team that owns it (and its definition).
The transformation: From chaos to instant answers
ZoomInfo rolled out the integration, and the change was immediate. Every cloud resource now had a clear source code link to the relevant code in the repository, direct links to those relevant code repositories, and connection to the responsible team. By automatically loading all developer-related cloud assets into the ZoomInfo catalog with Firefly, teams gained an instant and easy way to see and understand their infrastructure.
No more hunting: It's made resource management much easier by providing direct links to cloud consoles and relevant Terraform repositories, saving the team a lot of time.
Teams know what they own: The data provided by the Firefly Backstage plugin was a crucial first step that allowed ZoomInfo to accurately link components to their owning teams, which in turn, significantly improved collaboration.
But ZoomInfo discovered something even more valuable than faster incident response.
The breakthrough: From reactive to predictive cloud management
With clear ownership finally established, ZoomInfo could do something their team had never been able to do before: to get ahead of problems. De-Swaan describes it this way:
"This integration with Firefly brings immense value by enabling us to run automatic campaigns to prevent resource end-of-life instances and validate backups."
Instead of discovering issues during outages, ZoomInfo's team now catches them during routine sweeps. End-of-life resources get renewed before they expire. Backup validations happen automatically. No confusion, no chaos, and no surprises. De-Swaan adds:
“It has enhanced decision-making by providing a comprehensive view of our cloud assets and their links to code, which is essential to us for incident mitigation and prevention.”
ZoomInfo's advice? Start with clear definitions and ownership, and everything else will follow
Looking back, ZoomInfo realizes their previous way of working was holding back everything else they wanted to accomplish. Because once they solved the "who owns what?” and “where did this come from?” problem, suddenly they realized they could also tackle automation, monitoring, and optimization with much more confidence.
"I would highly recommend Firefly for any team who wants to have a centralized cloud asset catalog, across all vendors, that also helps you move faster, build more advanced solutions, and improve overall engineering efficiency."
ZoomInfo's experience proves something important: the best infrastructure solutions don't just fix tech problems. They fix the human problems that make the tech work harder (often unnecessarily so). Now, when a P1 incident hits ZoomInfo, their team can jump into action and focus on fixing the issue, not struggling to gather the context they need to solve it.
Firefly and Backstage: for ZoomInfo, that’s the difference between cloud chaos and cloud control.
