Case Study: Strategic DevOps and infrastructure optimization for a leading Software Development Company in Poland

Case Study: Strategic DevOps and infrastructure optimization for a leading Software Development Company in Poland

Client: 

A dynamically growing Custom Software Development Company in Poland, employing approximately 80 developers, specializing in complex corporate client projects. Key individuals from the internal infrastructure team had departed, revealing a lack of processes, competencies, and control over IT environments.

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Client's Challenge:

Before engaging our services, the company faced a series of critical challenges that negatively impacted its operational efficiency, security, and project profitability:

Lack of a stable DevOps/IT Team

The departure of the in-house DevOps specialist without a replacement exposed significant competency and process gaps. Often in such situations, one person simultaneously served as a developer and a DevOps engineer, which is not an optimal setup.

Outdated and unstable infrastructure

IT environments were unstable, lacked redundancy, directly affecting operational performance

Chaos in virtual machine management

The client maintained as many as 122 virtual machines (VMs) without documentation or utilization analysis, generating significant, unnecessary costs and hindering resource control.

Critical security gaps

The infrastructure was characterized by a lack of basic security policies, patching plans, and consistent backups. Furthermore, there was an absence of fundamental segregation of duties – developers had direct access to production environments and could, in effect, crash the system, posing an enormous risk to system stability and integrity. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA) had not been implemented fully.

Operational issues for development teams and product owners

A lack of process automation led to errors in manual deployments and the unavailability of test environments. Product Owners often complained because the infrastructure did not support smooth product roadmap execution.

Rapid company growth

Disjointed IT processes hampered coordination in a rapidly expanding organization.

Our actions and implemented solutions:

Following a detailed, comprehensive technical and organizational audit, we implemented holistic DevOps solutions, focusing on key areas:

01

In-depth Infrastructure and Cost Optimization:

  • As a result of the environment audit, we identified and optimized the number of virtual machines from 122 to 50, leaving only essential resources, representing a 64% cost reduction.
  • We introduced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform, Ansible. This enabled the client to dynamically launch and shut down entire environments (e.g., turning off development/testing environments over the weekend), which brought significant cloud cost savings.
  • We migrated environments from VMware Hydra to Hyper-V clusters with High Availability (HA), ensuring stability and reliability.
  • We implemented fast storage and RAID arrays, which significantly increased build performance.
  • We actively supported the optimization of license procurement (e.g., Windows and other licenses needed in the development cycle), which also translated into lower operational costs.

02

Automation of software delivery processes (CI/CD) and operational support:

  • We took over and fully automated the code publishing process (release pipelines) in Jenkins, minimizing manual interventions and accelerating the entire delivery cycle. This process was often performed manually by a single DevOps engineer before. These processes were strictly synchronized with the product roadmap and Product Owner’s needs.
  • We implemented comprehensive monitoring (Zabbix, Prometheus incl. custom exporters development, Grafana) and an alerting system (Wazuh), creating a central dashboard that provides full visibility into the system’s health status and all its components. The system alerted on potential issues (e.g., a failingdisk, application performance), enabling rapid response and preventing failures. Previously, monitoring was fragmented.
  • We implemented IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, including a Self-Service Application for systems built by the company for corporate clients.
  • We launched full Helpdesk and Service Desk support for users (e.g., computer issues), as well as hardware and network management (5 GHz Wi-Fi + VLAN, Aruba access points, SD-WAN). We established regulated reporting channels for the client, handling 1000+ service requests with full SLA and incident history over our 1st year, ensuring 24/7 availability. This transformed the response to incidents from manual and unsystematic to a fully professional process.
  • We took over ongoing IT Operations for B2B/B2C systems, including customer service and resolving user tickets.

03

Enhanced IT security and business continuity assurance:

  • We implemented segregation of duties (Separation of Duties) at both organizational and technical levels , eliminating unauthorized developer access to production environments.
  • We implemented Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA) for all systems.
  • We established consistent and diversified backup systems, storing data on various resources to eliminate a single point of failure. We also implemented full disaster recovery procedures (DRP).
  • We deployed SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) – a central system for managing security that collects logs from all infrastructure components and uses AI to correlate seemingly unrelated events to predict and detect threats in real-time (e.g., unauthorized login attempts from different locations at the same time).
  • We performed code scanning to identify security vulnerabilities, such as hardcoded credentials (login/password directly in the code). We also supported code refactoring to improve its security.
  • We completed technical documentation and system architecture (LLD).
  • We implemented policies for passwords, updates, End-of-Life (EOL), patching, and system hardening.
  • We established on-boarding and off-boarding processes for employees in the context of managing access to systems and data.
Measurable results and key benefits:

Our collaboration with the custom software development company yielded tangible benefits that directly translated into increased profitability and market position:

Significant reduction in operational costs: 

Optimization of virtual machines from 122 to 50 resulted in a 64% reduction in infrastructure costs. The total cost of the internal IT department (estimated at 9-10K EUR/month) was reduced to 5K EUR/month with outsourcing, signifying savings of at least 4K EUR monthly.

Substantial shortening of release time:

The time to deploy a new software version was reduced from an average of 5 days to 2 day (60% faster) through automation.

Increased security and stability: 

Environment uptime rose from “unstable, outages” to >99.95% availability. The elimination of critical security vulnerabilities and the implementation of comprehensive monitoring and DRP ensured business continuity and minimized downtime risks.

Improved network performance:

Implemented Centralized Aruba network with fast cache roaming, ClientMatch, and dynamic band optimization – seamless handover and stable performance under load.

VLAN segmentation, built-in AP-level firewall, guest access policies, ClearPass-ready. This resulted in a 10x increase in network performance.

Professional incident management: 

Response to incidents transitioned from “manual, no system” to handling 1000+ in 1st yearservice requests with full SLA and incident history.

Enhanced code quality and security: 

CI/CD with automated security tests was introduced, eliminating the previous lack of security in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Full transparency and control: 

Every incident and change request is documented, ensuring full visibility into operations.

Comprehensive ITSM support.

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