Case Study: Improving Design, Build, Test and Deployment Maturity with DevSecOps

Case Study: Cloud Patterns in Product Development and Service Delivery

We have been supporting our specialist client for many years in solution and produce development. They are a specialist supplier of secure call recording, interview and media management solutions for the Finance and Public Sector, developing range of enterprise applications to support the capturing, storing and management of evidential content for compliance, regulation and legislation. To help the business to meet its challenging delivery needs, and improve delivery performance, as well as meet a number of complex challenges for tactical and strategic services, we worked with the CTO and ICT team to review both architecture, tooling, cloud adoption, as well as service maturity. The core applications had evolved over the years, but remained “traditional” 2-Tier applications, that needed to be re-engineered to meet cloud design patterns, simpler/faster development/test cycles and improved quality to meet service needs. The business also need to ensure performance and scaling of the services as they were rolled out to (increasing) client workloads. We looked across the agile delivery process, team organisation, key technical and delivery resources, delivery structures and technical design authority. Over this journey, our Specialists were able to support the leadership team with ;-

• Design review of the solution to understand product, client needs, solution requirements, constraints, and technical road map against business goals to help position delivery strategy against needs.
• Review of the application design, and provide technical leadership in moving the solution from SQL to NoSQL Helped lead the design activity, and seeded the POC to improve confidence and help with the understanding inside the organisation. Resolution of Service and design needs and to meet resilience and service outcomes. Evaluation through design workshops and a POC. Support Data Migration, Data Recovery, and Highly Available Evidence based needs. Cloud technical design re-architecting for * performance, cloud/hosting and deployment patterns. Financial Modeling, and Service delivery risks/skills/resource needs to enable the client to prepare for deployment projects.
• Review of existing skills and capacity to against critical product and deployment milestones. Advisory on skills gaps and target team structure to help meet the challenge.
• Forward planning to provide the capability, experience and capacity to meet the delivery challenge. Business Case/Financial Planning around use of Offshore/outsourced services. Identification of route, roles, selection and hiring, and control processes of new offshore resources. Supported the on-boarding, quality control and embedding, including use of tooling and processes to get the best from the distributed multi-cultural team.
• Critical Friend to Interim CTO. supporting the engineering team, on release planning, backlog/design phasing, and resource coordination.
• Design Lead, and Critical Friend, on the migration to MongoDB, with a resilient Elasticsearch solution to meet performance needs. Software Integration and Cloud Solution engineering ( use of Cloud Service bus pattern/Cloud Orchestration ) to simplify, modernise and enhance the product.
• Adoption of DevOps/Automation, to simplify field deployment. POC and delivery of Automation (Terraform and Chef), to create consistent auto-deployed testing environment, and coded solution for field deployment. Automated Security hardening to meet accredited/ISO27K environments. Provision of DevOps team to implement, support and maintain the infrastructure-as-code.
• Training and Skills transfer to in-house engineering and operational team on DevOps tooling, Software Defined Networks/WAN and Cloud adoption. Guides, One-to-One training, Team/Squad ‘Tech Forum’, as well as supporting the leadership team on market and industry changes.