An enterprise guide to buying CDEs

Talia Moyal / Head of Outbound Product at Gitpod / Jan 29, 2025

There’s a tug of war happening in every regulated enterprise right now. Security teams are pushing for tighter controls, while developers and leadership want to ship faster. The companies that win won’t be choosing between security and speed – they’ll deliver both using cloud development environments (CDEs). CDEs are not just another developer tool, they are strategic infrastructure that will determine your ability to attract top talent, build powerful and economically-sound organizations, and embrace the AI-powered future of software development.

This enterprise buyers guide will walk you through how to evaluate and choose a CDE at enterprise scale.

In this guide:

• Why enterprises adopt CDEs

• Most common CDE use cases

• CDE evaluation criteria

• The CDE landscape

• Enterprise adoption timeline

• Making the right choice

Why enterprises adopt CDEs

Since launching our enterprise offering, we’ve grown to support more than 1.5M developers, with the most traction across the world’s largest private equity and healthcare companies. While CDEs initially emerged as remote development solutions, their impact now extends far beyond that. What we typically see, is organizations facing any of these challenges:

• Your security team pushes for VDI while developer productivity and experience suffers

• Environment inconsistencies cause delays and frustrations

• Onboarding new developers takes weeks instead of hours

• Maintaining consistent development environments requires dedicated full-time resources

• You need to ensure code never leaves secure infrastructure

• Your team struggles with effective collaboration on complex projects

• You’re planning to adopt AI coding assistants securely

• You need to evaluate or roll-out coding agents

Most common CDE use cases

We’ve broken this guide into common CDE use cases and CDE evaluation criteria. This is to give you an idea of what value you should expect to receive from a CDE, as well as the dimensions that you should evaluate a CDE.

Enterprise use cases for CDE align with four key initiatives:

• Developer productivity & onboarding

• Security & compliance

• Cost management

• Strategic initiatives

Each of these initiatives have multiple use cases you can leverage as needed.

Developer productivity & onboarding

Improvements across developer productivity and onboarding accelerate time to market and increase developer satisfaction. Each day spent on engineering onboarding costs approximately $500 in lost productivity per developer. For organizations hiring 100 developers annually with a typical 33-day onboarding period, this represents $1.25M in lost productivity – not counting the opportunity cost of delayed development.

Expect:

• Reduced onboarding time from weeks to hours

• Automated environment setup and maintenance

• Eliminated “works on my machine” issues

• Seamless collaboration and pair programming

• Improved developer satisfaction and retention

Security and compliance

What was once a tradeoff to developer productivity is now a requirement. Your CDE is the easiest way for you to ensure both developer productivity and security requirements are being met without compromise.

Expect:

• Secure source code storage off local machines

• Isolated development environments

• Automated secrets management

• Fine-grained access controls with comprehensive audit logs

• Full VDI replacement capabilities

• SOC 2 Type II and EU GDPR compliance

• Self-hosted data sovereignty

​​Cost management

Cost management is not just about cost of tooling, it’s also about resources spent internally to staff a project.

Expect:

• Zero dedicated headcount for environment maintenance

• 50% reduction in VDI costs

• No additional build time requirements

• Automated scaling based on usage

• Reduced operational overhead

Strategic initiatives

Support for strategic initiatives will help you future-proof your development ecosystem to ultimately help you grow revenue. These are use cases that can be further enabled by having the right development environment setup.

Expect:

• Full integration with existing and new tooling

• Secure infrastructure for AI coding assistants

• Zero manual steps for new initiative adoption

• Centralized control for automatic deployment of new initiatives

CDE platform evaluation criteria

When it comes to CDE platform evaluation criteria, there are five dimensions that we consider table stakes requirements. These are requirements you should not compromise on when selecting a vendor. This includes:

• Hosting and management model

• Enterprise-grade security

• Hidden costs

• Developer experience

• Extensibility

Look for minimal overhead with maximum security hosting and management

There are three main ways in which a CDE can be hosted and managed:

• Self-hosted and self-managed: Your cloud, your operations team

• Self-hosted and vendor-managed: Your cloud, vendor operations

• Vendor-hosted and vendor-managed: Vendor cloud and operations

Our experience with major banks and healthcare providers shows us that self-hosted and vendor-managed is the only sustainable model at enterprise scale. This model meets all compliance requirements without requiring 10-15 internal staff for management.

Side bar on hosting and management models:

Self-hosted and self-managed software provides you maximum infrastructure choice at the cost of maximum overhead. It checks the boxes for security benefits associated with being hosted within your cloud infrastructure—provided you implement those security controls—by allowing you to manage and maintain every service related to that software: the components, data storage methods, computing resources, networking setup, observability, etc. But because of this degree of customization, setup is tedious and requires you to be an infrastructure expert.

Self-managed models are also where you get sneaky ‘day 2’ overhead. Day 2 overhead refers to the operations and maintenance expenses of software. This cost gets overlooked in initial ROI calculations, and requires evaluators to be thoughtful about the delivery model with regards to type of management. The best questions to ask yourself:

• How long is the setup of this CDE?

• Will this CDE require me to resource a team to maintain it?

• Will that resources team be required to be infrastructure experts?

• Do I already have those experts in-house?

As it stands today, we see self-managed software as the largest contributor to day 2 overhead for purchased technology.

Vendor-hosted and vendor-managed solutions are the complete opposite. They’re what we’re used to calling your typical ‘SaaS’ offering. They’re quick to set up, have no overhead, but offer limited customization and often are incompatible with enterprise compliance requirements. These solutions are often great for smaller teams with simple setups.

Self-hosted and vendor-managed solutions are your Goldilocks solutions. They provide the security benefits of being hosted in your organization’s cloud infrastructure, as well as the ease and efficiency of being managed by a vendor. They eliminate any need for you to operate the software and require minimal upfront investment.

Centralized security and compliance controls  

CDEs offer centralized control of security and compliance related to development environments. The specific requirements will be personal to each organization. That said, essential considerations include:

• Data sovereignty and storage location control

• Production environment isolation

• Administrative access controls

• Comprehensive audit logging

• Authentication mechanisms

• Industry certifications (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001)

• Secrets management capabilities

• Network isolation features

Your ability to replace potential existing VDI setups serves as a good indicator of enterprise-grade security capabilities.

Buying is more cost effective than building

Building an internal CDE solution takes significant resources. CDEs are mission-critical infrastructure and require significant uptime SLAs. Expect a headcount of 10-15 infrastructure engineers to support several hundred developers if building a CDE. Here are some of the considerations you’d have to consider if you were buying:

• Complexity

  • Environment provisioning

  • Build and maintain prebuilding systems

  • Handle scaling, monitoring and reliability

  • Security functionality

• Ongoing maintenance burdens

  • Requires a dedicated platform team

  • Continuous updates for security and compatibility

  • Support multiple IDEs and tools

  • Managing cloud infrastructure and costs

• Opportunity cost

  • Engineering resources diverted from core business

  • Slower time to market for features

  • Limited ability to innovate on developer experience

You can also use these bullets to think about build requirements from self-managed CDE vendors.

Focus on developer experience

Successful adoption requires seamless integration with your existing development ecosystem and careful thought into how a tool will be used. Evaluate vendors based on:

• Current tool integration capabilities

• Support for planned strategic initiatives

• Customization options

• IDE support

CDE landscape

CDEs break the trade-off between security and developer productivity but not all CDEs are created equal. In the table below, we include a comparison across common CDE players, in addition to building your own CDE and VDI – a common technology that CDEs can replace.

A note on VDI: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure like Citrix and VMWare Horizon provide enterprise-grade security at the expense of developer experience. A VDI is general purpose software for remote workstation access – not a purpose-built platform for standardizing and securing development environments.

Gitpod’s enterprise adoption timeline

Every week you spend with your developers struggling with ‘works on my machine’ issues, your organization is spending tens or hundreds of thousands a week. We have an opinionated, yet effective approach that takes you from goal definition through a technical proof of value to full adoption and realization of your return on investment.

Week 1: Discovery

Identify which business problems a CDE solves your organization (ship software faster, make development environments more secure etc.).

• Align on success metrics

• Identify specific requirements

• Document integration needs

Week 2: Personalized demo

See how your personal development workflows will improve with a CDE.

• Live product walkthrough

• Technical Q\&A

• Integration demonstration

Week 3: ROI Assessment

Validate your organization’s return-on-investment from this CDE initiative.

After the demo we go through our battletested ROI template. We regularly see 500-600% ROI through faster onboarding, improved developer retention, reduced security vulnerabilities, and infrastructure savings. Check it out yourself.

Week 4-5: Architecture review & installation

Install CDE in your cloud infrastructure and launch first workspace.

• Architecture and networking review

• Install in private network using IAC templates

• Configure SSO, SCM

Week 6-7: Testing

Prove most important use cases and collect feedback from your users.

• Deploy with pilot team

• Collect feedback from test users

• Measure concrete impact based on test criteria

Week 8-12: Procurement

Complete procurement process.

• Finalize adoption timeline

• Agree on commercial terms

• Set service level agreements

• Select support package

Week 13: Roll-out

Roll-out CDE across your organization.

• Milestone-based, staged roll-out across organization

• Measure and report back ROI (impact on developer productivity)

Why Fortune 500 companies choose Gitpod

We work with the largest private equity firms, banks, healthcare providers, insurance companies, globally. They choose Gitpod for three main reasons:

• Gitpod is the only fully managed CDE that runs in your infrastructure: all other tools force you to host code in their cloud, or put the operational burden onto your team. We’ve learned the hard way that operationally managing development environments at enterprise scale requires serious expertise. That’s why Gitpod gives you a solution that runs in your cloud but fully managed by us under an SLA.

• Gitpod leads the market in developer experience and IDE support: Gitpod is a native development experience that feels exactly like working locally. Your developers keep their VS Code or IntelliJ setup but everything runs in secure infrastructure. No other vendor comes close to our IntelliJ integration and for regulated enterprises where developers demand these powerful integrations this is essential.

• Gitpod is built from the ground up for large-scale, regulated enterprises: Gitpod automates every aspect of the development environment dependencies, packages, secrets management, access controls - and does it in a way that scales to thousands of developers while always meeting the security requirements of those even in regulated industries.

Learn more about how Gitpod can support your use cases by booking a demo today.