Can Your Digital Infrastructure Handle the Pressures of COVID-19?

Many companies are currently struggling to adapt their digital channels quickly enough to meet the shifts in consumer behaviour and demand. Either they have found it impossible to scale up to meet an explosion in demand. Or, for those companies who have seen a rapid short-term drop in traffic, they have been unable to scale down and are left paying for expensive infrastructure at a time when managing costs is critical to the longer-term viability of the business. 

When we emerge on the other side of this crisis, there will be an even greater focus on agile product delivery, supported by scalable infrastructure. Whilst digital marketing and integrated customer journeys (clicks and bricks will still remain important, further emphasis will be placed on revenue generating digital experiences where possible. 

When supporting agile transformations in a complex business we always focus on creating a DevOps culture and a move towards continuous delivery, combined with enabling scalable, robust, flexible and automated infrastructures. 

The award winning DevOps transformation that we carried out with Vodafone enabled them to move from a few deployments a year to over 25 releases to customers every month. Whilst that was transformational, the scalability and resilience that was built into the architecture also meant they were able to outperform their competitors at the launch of the new iPhone last year. Crucially, it has allowed their core platform to scale up and down to meet fluctuating demands during the Covid-19 crisis in a way that would not have been possible a couple of years ago and is currently not possible for many companies today. 

If you are on this journey or are looking to improve your current architecture as part of a wider digital transformation programme, then our Infrastructure Audit is a great place to start. Our DevOps and infrastructure experts can work with you remotely to:

• Review any existing future-state architecture plans for your infrastructure.
• Ensure you are architecting to get the best out of your cloud platform rather than just “lifting and shifting” from your legacy infrastructure.
• Look at how you can best introduce automation including Infrastructure as Code capabilities to ensure your teams can spin up infrastructure easily.
• Eliminate downtime during deployments with “blue/green” deployments as well as rapid configuration with best-of-breed tools.
• Improve your DevOps culture by routing service alerts or failures straight to your teams.
• Ensure you have world-class monitoring and alerting solutions in place.
• Our aim is to provide you with maximum confidence that your teams can rapidly but safely release value to your customers, while rolling back where they need to. 

Crucially all of this will have the additional benefit of enabling a complex, robust infrastructure that can be scaled up to take advantage of the peaks. But also scaled down to save costs when it’s not needed. 

If you feel that your organisation could benefit from this approach, please drop me an email at james.c@mmtdigital.co.uk