GitHub goes to work

December 4, 2017

As teams explore more collaborative ways to develop software, GitHub is delivering the ultimate social development platform for businesses—one that grows with their goals.

Some background on GitHub’s business solutions

In 2008, GitHub was created to solve the software needs of our developers and developers like us. As our community evolved to include larger development teams, we made it easier for teams to work on GitHub together with the introduction of organization accounts.

2011: Launch of GitHub Enterprise (now GitHub Enterprise Server)

In 2011, we answered teams’ requests for more management and security options with GitHub Enterprise, an on-premises solution with more granular control options, security capabilities, and enterprise-level support. We’ve continued to expand our on-premises offering and adapt to meet customer needs with deep AWS integrations, intuitive APIs, and customizable workflows.

2017: Launch of GitHub Business Cloud (now GitHub Enterprise Cloud)

As more businesses built their development infrastructures around GitHub, we built a cloud solution that offered the same versatility, security, and control developers had come to expect from GitHub. With Business Cloud, teams could get the features they need, wherever they code.

How does GitHub work for businesses?

Build software with greater stability, security, flexibility, and administrative control over your development ecosystem. When your team builds on GitHub, they can do their best work using a comprehensive platform that adapts to their unique needs.

Features

Enterprise Server and Enterprise Cloud are built to grow with your team.

Flexible hosting

Our solutions for businesses add powerful tools, integrations, and community partners to the tools your team already uses.

Flexible hosting options give your team:

• Access to integrations our global community
• Simplified pricing of $21/month for each user
• The same premium experience, wherever you keep your code

Reduced administrative overhead

As your team grows, managing tools, permissions, security, and seats for your development environment can get complicated. Our business solutions make account management simpler for growing teams and automate many administrative responsibilities. Enterprise Cloud gives you automated identity management, a wide range of integrations, customizable APIs, and more control over permissions and settings. That means your team can worry less about contacting IT and focus on writing great software.

Automated authentication and identity management

Authentication protocols can seem like a hassle, but they’re an important part of keeping your code safe. Automated provisioning and deprovisioning of team members reduces the amount of time needed to onboard or offboard developers. The addition of SAML single-sign-on makes it easy to manage which users have access to which systems.

Authentication and identity management give your team:

• Easy team member onboarding and offboarding in one place
• SAML SSO with support for Ping Identity, Okta, Onelogin, Azure AD, Shibboleth
• Administrators can manage members’ identities and access

Granular permissions

Administrators need controls that provide flexibility and keep their organizations secure. Enterprise Server and Enterprise Cloud bring more granular permissions that adapt as your team grows. These fine-grained permissions are designed to make it easier to manage teams, control organization-wide settings, and improve security.

Granular permissions give your team:

• Control over permissions for individual repos and users
• Specific access to repos for ad-hoc teams, consultants, and contractors
• Organization-wide permissions and settings

Integrations and APIs

There are an infinite number of workflows available with GitHub’s set of integrations and intuitive API. When you can’t find the right tool for the job on GitHub Marketplace or in our integrations directory, you can use our GraphQL API to build what you need.

Integrations and APIs give your team:

• Tools to discover or build exactly what your workflow needs
• Custom error reporting and project management
• A growing directory of new integrations from the GitHub community

Stability and support

Our world class support teams keep you running with little-to-no downtime, so you can keep shipping the best versions of your code.

Our stability and support give your team:

• 99.95% uptime guarantee
• 24/5 support
• < 8-hour response times

Write better code

Build on your workflow with all the tools and features developers already use and love.

Code review

Lightweight code review tools are built into every pull request, so teams can be confident in the code they push.

• Diffs: Preview changes in context with your code to see what is being proposed. Side-by-side diffs highlight added, edited, and deleted code right next to the original file, so you can quickly spot changes.
• History: Browse commits, comments, and references related to your pull request in a timeline view. Your pull request will also highlight what’s changed since you last checked.
• Blame: See what a file looked like before a particular change. With blame view, you can see how any portion of your file has evolved over time without viewing the file’s full history.

Discuss code with your team using built in comments, review requests, and @mentions. You’ll also be able to collaborate with teams organization-wide and create ad-hoc teams to tackle unique projects.

Secure development

As your teams grow, so does your need to enforce development practices that keep code safe without overburdening your process. With tools that allow for authored code, automated compliance workflows, and protected branches, you can also save your code from accidental changes.

Support for commit signatures

Commit signatures make it easy for developers to sign their code and review data if anything goes wrong.

Protected branches

Built-in status checks make sure your code meets your team’s standards every time a commit is pushed.

What’s next

We’d love to help you find the right solution for your team. If there’s something missing that would make GitHub the right place for your team’s code, let us know. We’re just getting started.

Learn more about how we can build better software, together.