Advance.io, a groupelephant.com business, provides cloud DevOps services to a South African financial services giant through a flexible skillset augmentation model.

Our long-standing client is a South African based financial services group listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and providing insurance, asset management and investment services across Africa and the UK.

They have a complex IT infrastructure with disparate financial systems, all of which are subject to Financial Intelligence Centre Act compliance requirements. A recent migration of most of these systems onto AWS cloud infrastructure included redesigning and implementing improved CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery) processes, as part of their DevOps approach.

Such a move typically requires access to plenty of expertise in cloud architecture, DevOps best practices, security principles, containers and orchestration, and databases. Further compounding the complexity is the rigor and thoroughness that is expected within the financial services industry. Our client decided to rely on specialists from Advance.io, based on the highly satisfactory, multi-year historic relationship.

To address the requirement for an almost on-demand need for various specialist skills, they adopted an Advance.io-defined skillset augmentation model providing access to plenty of capability, yielding remarkable value for money. This pool of experts operated under the aegis of the leader of the ongoing Advance.io engagement with the client. The new arrangement is now in place for a 12-month period, following a resoundingly successful 2-month pilot.

‘We are thoroughly impressed by the knowledge that Advance.io people have demonstrated,’ said a client executive. ‘We have access to the right experts when we need them, allowing us to quickly get over technical hurdles that we’ve encountered as part of the migration, and post migration.’