Thinking of outsourcing your IT function – Careful what you wish for!!!

There are several reasons to outsource your IT function, including but not limited to cost reduction, improving customer focus and accelerating infrastructure transformation.

A client I have been working closely with has recently embarked upon that journey and from 4 incumbent vendors have selected one to whom they have entrusted their whole IT function. This has involved the wholesale transfer of both other partner staff plus internal IT roles, including some hybrid business roles. The change impact has been massive and disruptive but is now settling down into a more positive rhythm.

Microsoft is positioned as the Cloud platform of choice, and 365 the desktop platform. The telephony and IVR solutions are all on-premise and recent phenomena has seen most Cloud vendors brutally announce the end of life for their previous flagship on-premise platforms. The CRM and ERP platforms are a blend of on-premise and cloud and most of the new development is taking place in digital as it is easier and siloed.

An initial review of the other 3 exiting partners and dev ops methodologies has revealed major differences in approach and structure. This added to the need to retire dated on-premise solutions have provided a massive opportunity to drive an Infrastructure as a Service IAAC transformation.

The pricing model is based upon outcome points so it is vital that business requirements are fully described and detailed such that the new IT partner can be responsive, can accurately estimate the effort required to deliver and thus fix the outcome price.

At the heart of the cloud transformation strategy is ensuring absolute consistency across all the 3rd party developed platforms which fundamentally rules out a “lift and shift” even as a bridging strategy. A platform such as Sigma Cloud can be a vital building block in ensuring that this journey is successful.

In addition to the obvious security and compliance benefits, Sigma Cloud can also assist in the education and evangelising of disparate staff.

A DevOps team includes developers and IT operations working collaboratively throughout the product lifecycle, to increase the speed and quality of software deployment. It’s a new way of working, a cultural shift, that has significant implications for teams and the organizations they work for. When these teams are a product of different providers and in-house staff, they will need a common philosophy and easy to use and deploy tools.

At its heart DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.

A DevOps team includes developers and IT operations working collaboratively throughout the product lifecycle, to increase the speed and quality of software deployment. It’s a new way of working, a cultural shift, that has significant implications for teams and the organizations they work for.

Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams merge into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle — from development and test to deployment and operations — and have a range of multidisciplinary skills.

DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to increase reliability. A DevOps toolchain helps teams tackle important DevOps fundamentals including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration.

DevOps values are sometimes applied to teams other than development. When security teams adopt a DevOps approach, security is an active and integrated part of the development process.

In this environment it is essential that you develop an effective DevOps culture that enables Operations and Development staff to work seamlessly in an agile fashion. In the client environment I have described Operations teams that are not close to Development and will typically not have a comprehensive understanding of what the code they are deploying is supposed to deliver. The result has been numerous outages post the roll-out of micro and major releases. The business impact being lost sales, lower revenue, and higher costs.

Operations teams that are not close to Development will typically not have a comprehensive understanding of what the code they are deploying is supposed to do. In the client environment I am describing this has an increased degree of difficulty. We have suggested that the answer is introducing Sigma Cloud as the standardised Dev Ops platform, a set of standards and processes that will ensure that as each legacy platform is migrated to the Cloud it is done so consistently and effectively.

We believe Sigma Cloud can help create what is effectively a “no operations” environment and thus free developers to do what they do best – build functionality that delivers positive business outcomes.

In a business environment that punishes those companies that cannot be agile and keep ahead of the competition, not taking the leap with a platform like Sigma Cloud could be catastrophic.

We would love to talk to you further