Industry
Retail
Services used
Cloud Automation
Partners used
MSP
Cloud Automation
Overview
Our client is a global retail organization. Prior to our collaboration, they had migrated their systems to the cloud using a “lift and shift” method. The company was eager to revamp and expand their eCommerce presence and wanted to accelerate their service deployment. They already knew the many benefits of automating tasks and processes in the cloud, i.e. accelerating their speed to market, reductions in outages, improved self-service and increased security. After some starts and stops, they struggled to meet their goals.
Challenge
To help a client that was ready to leverage their presence in the cloud to take the next step towards automation.
Approach
We partnered with the company to analyze their current environment, their staff and talent, existing technology and their goals for the future.
PEOPLE
- Each technology team was accustomed to working independently to develop solutions
- We analyzed the skillset of their existing staff and recommended that they reorganize into groups of multi-disciplined product teams who design, develop, build, and operate the solutions under their responsibility
PROCESS
- We then worked with the newly re-aligned cross-functional teams to develop a standard, repeatable methodology for developing solutions
- During the implementation we identified the need for additional training of the existing staff and supplemental skills required to insure the sustainability of the approach
TECHNOLOGY
- The client had moved their systems to the cloud, but they were still performing application development and server management tasks in the same manual way they had, when they were in a traditional datacenter.
- We designed and helped them implement a DevOps solution for application development, infrastructure as Code (IAC), injected security, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance.
Results
Within 3 months the shift in organizational alignment and the introduction of a standard DevOps solution led to a much faster speed to market. When we completed the project our client saw:
- Server build time improvement
- 4 weeks reduced to 2 hours
- Security vulnerabilities (based on scans)
- Dropped by 80%
- Application deployment time improvement
- Reduced from months with errors to 2 times per week with rapid backout capability
- Temporary development environments
- From fixed high cost to rapid on demand deployment and decommission
- Meantime to repair (MTTR) improvement
- From 20 hours to under 1 hour
Client Feedback
" You took what was imagined to be a multi-year project, and fully implemented it well inside a year with incredible results, there is no way we could have done this without you."
" I am so glad we went with cloudEQ. We got exactly what we needed and more, with a much lower price point than the big 5 firms quoted, and in half the time."
