Canva Helps Enterprises Redefine Brand Management and Collaboration with Design Tools Powered by AWS

After launching Canva Pro, Canva sought to respond to the needs of larger enterprises. “We found that enterprises had a lot of design projects in their pipeline, but their sales and marketing teams were waiting up to eight weeks for simple edits and changes to be implemented by designers,” says Eitel. “That gave us the idea to offer a new enterprise solution.”

As Canva began to develop Canva for Enterprise, the company sharpened its focus on reliability, security, and scalability. “Those are the three main things enterprises are looking for,” Eitel says. “They need to ensure their distributed global teams can access designs at all times, and we need to assure users that they can scale as their teams grow, in a secure way.”

To meet these needs, Canva knew it would run Canva for Enterprise on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, which has been the company’s preferred cloud for its free and Pro versions since its inception. Canva uses AWS services including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for image processing and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for data storage. Additionally, it relies on Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Personalize for personalization of the user experience and Amazon Inspector for security assessments. “AWS has always provided scalability, enhanced security, and high availability,” says Jim Tyrrell, head of Infrastructure at Canva.

Canva launched Canva for Enterprise in November 2019, offering an enterprise platform designed to help large teams collaborate more effectively. Brands using Canva for Enterprise include HubSpot, PayPal, Danone, and Warner Music Group. Using this version of the platform, teams of up to thousands of users can share designs and create together seamlessly no matter where they are located. Teams using Canva have tripled the number of presentations in the past year, and teams create more than 6 million presentations in Canva each week. Jenn Proud, head of Global Marketing Design for HubSpot, says, “There's so much rapid scaling happening, the only way for a design team to keep up is to create infrastructure around design. Canva has been the perfect solution for that without having to build something custom on our own.”

By running Canva for Enterprise on AWS, Canva is confident the platform can easily expand. “We’ve recently launched innovative new features around presentations and video, which led to increased requirements for computational power and storage. We would never have been able to scale this solution without AWS,” Tyrrell says. That scalability has also enabled Canva to rapidly grow its business. The company has doubled in size by employees and revenue every year since its launch, and has seen a 320 percent increase in both paid and freemium users of the online platform over the past year. “We’re seeing a lot of success for Canva for Enterprise in verticals such as real estate, media & entertainment, consumer packaged goods, and technology,” says Eitel. “We’re currently onboarding our largest team and largest user so far, and we have no concerns about scaling to support that.”

Canva ensures a seamless experience for its Canva Pro and Enterprise users by running on multiple AWS Regions and Availability Zones for high availability. “Our users depend on our solution to collaborate, and we have to make sure our users are not getting locked out of the system,” says Eitel. “We’ve tested our Enterprise platform with teams of tens of thousands of users and never encountered issues.”

This reliability also enhances the performance needs of the company’s design users. “If users can’t access their designs or the platform is lagging or slow to respond, they will find another solution. But because of the way we have architected our solution on AWS, our users can easily share designs and collaborate” says Tyrrell.

To offer Canva for Enterprise as a secure platform, the business uses AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) to securely manage access to AWS services and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to encrypt data. “Enterprises have compliance teams and tight regulatory requirements, and they can’t purchase a tool like ours if we don’t meet their expectations,” Eitel says. “Being on AWS gives us credibility in the enterprise space by enabling us to check every box and answer our users’ security questions confidently.”

Additionally, Canva ensures compliance by taking advantage of AWS Regions. “We have sales teams for Canva for Enterprise in Australia, the United States, and China. We’ll also be launching in Europe and Latin America soon,” says Eitel. “Knowing we can expand our business with AWS Global Infrastructure, especially if we need to comply with different data privacy regulations, eases my mind.” 

Looking ahead, Canva plans to introduce new video editing capabilities, such as a background remover for online videos. Eitel says, “We’ll continue to help our global users collaborate on video while performing complex editing tasks, supporting these capabilities with the power of our platform on AWS.”

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