DevOps Archives - rinf.tech https://www.rinf.tech/tag/devops/ Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:21:53 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.rinf.tech/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/favicon-150x150.png DevOps Archives - rinf.tech https://www.rinf.tech/tag/devops/ 32 32 DevOps Outsourcing Best Practices in 2023 https://www.rinf.tech/devops-outsourcing-best-practices-in-2023/ Fri, 21 Apr 2023 11:52:24 +0000 https://www.rinf.tech/?p=23053 DevOps outsourcing, like any significant business decision, has challenges and risks. This article explores DevOps outsourcing best practices in 2023.

The post DevOps Outsourcing Best Practices in 2023 appeared first on rinf.tech.

]]>

DevOps Outsourcing Best Practices in 2023

DevOps is a collection of tools, technologies, personnel, practices, and philosophies that combines software development and operations. The reason for combining these two critical activities is to enhance time-to-market and streamline the deployment of products and services. Many businesses decide to outsource their DevOps. This is because numerous benefits can be unlocked by choosing to outsource DevOps.

DevOps is growing all over the world. The projection for the global DevOps market shows a value of $30 billion in 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of 20% since 2022. The primary drivers for this growth are a global need for accelerated deployment to stay competitive, adopting AI-powered automation tools and technologies, shifting from a monolithic architecture to microservices, and optimizing IT budgets.

DevOps outsourcing, like any significant business decision, has challenges and risks. However, companies can navigate these risks with careful planning and expert solution providers.

In this article, we’ll explore DevOps outsourcing best practices in 2023.

Contents

When Does It Make Sense to Outsource DevOps?

Lack of In-House Expertise

Not all businesses have large IT teams who can fulfill their every need. Most companies also need more money to hire new full-time personnel, especially considering the global IT skills shortage.

Cost-Savings

DevOps is an excellent solution for companies whose IT budgets and resources are already being spread thin. The quicker development cycles that DevOps offers result in fewer resources being spent. DevOps also ensures minimal disruptions and downtime, both of which can cause severe financial damage.

Legacy infrastructure and processes can be expensive and high maintenance. DevOps is a great fix for those problems. Furthermore, automation is a vital component of DevOps. It offers a cost-effective way of keeping up with the demands of the modern world.

Scalability

Scalability is one of the most important attributes modern businesses need to succeed. In most sectors, demand is only going to keep rising. Companies with highly rigid infrastructures and processes won’t be able to keep up with growing demand. For those businesses with an eye on the future, DevOps offers high degrees of scalability. 

Access to New Tools and Technologies

Businesses must keep a keen eye on new tools and technologies arising at unprecedented speeds. Companies stifled due to legacy or suboptimal tools and technologies could use DevOps as an entryway to access these exciting new technologies.

By utilizing new technologies via DevOps, businesses can also enter the world of DevSecOps, which stands for “development, security, and operations.”

DevSecOps is an extension of DevOps, where highly advanced security tools and technologies are integrated into every step of a development cycle. Security must be a priority, and that’s something DevSecOps can provide.

24/7 Support

A company needs to serve its clients and customers around the clock. However, realistically, most in-house IT teams and engineers can offer around 40 hours a week, most of which are restricted to a typical 9 to 5 schedule.

Outsourcing DevOps is a great option for companies that need development and operations to run 24/7. DevOps can result in an environment that is self-healing. Powerful automated monitoring, reporting, deployment, and optimization are just some of the many around-the-clock offerings that an expert service provider can provide.

Short-Term Projects

Sometimes, short-term projects don’t warrant the commissioning of full-time resources. Onboarding full-time employees for short-term projects can be a laborious process. Moreover, those resources might not be required once their project concludes. Outsourcing DevOps is a great way to serve short-term projects without hemorrhaging money.

The best service providers will ensure that companies don’t suffer from a contractual lock-in. With world-class solutions providers and services quickly commissioned and decommissioned on demand, companies don’t have to pay for what they don’t use.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a DevOps Outsourcing Provider

Expertise

No matter what frills a DevOps service provider might offer, expertise is the fundamental factor that should drive decisions. The best DevOps providers worldwide are true experts for whom DevOps isn’t an afterthought or a supplementary offering. Expertise in DevOps means that a service provider has world-class automation, coding, and security skills, innovative capabilities with AI technologies, and ultimate professionalism.

Robust Delivery Ecosystem

The COVID-19 pandemic blurred geographical boundaries, forcing the world to embrace remote work and online collaboration. DevOps providers must offer a robust delivery ecosystem and the ability to deliver services from multiple locations. That’s why rinf.tech has offices and delivery centers worldwide, including Mexico, the United States, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey, Poland, and Germany.   

Cost and Budgets

While DevOps is integral to a business, it can’t eat into the entire budget of an organization. Companies must carefully consider their resources and choose service providers that fit their budgets. The best service providers are the rare ones that offer the quality of a multinational company at a price affordable for SMEs.

Delivery Models

Businesses need to study the delivery models that service providers offer. This is because even excellent services can be stifled by suboptimal delivery models. At rinf.tech, we provide delivery models that are incredibly beneficial to a diverse range of companies. They include team extension, which involves finding DevOps talent for custom software development projects. rinf.tech’s team outsourcing framework involves project setup, team setup, project management, and delivery.

We also offer managed services, which include receiving initial inputs, followed by service management, transition, and delivery, and managed team services, which involve a project setup, team setup, project team management, and project delivery. These collaborative delivery models are some of the most important factors to consider when outsourcing a service provider.

Communication and Collaboration

Nothing is more frustrating for companies than outsourcing to a service provider and receiving impersonal and generic support. The best DevOps providers offer highly personalized services and support via extended DevOps teams every step of the way. DevOps solutions need to be tailored to the intricate needs of a company. Therefore, companies should only choose service providers who offer close collaborative relationships.

Culture and Values

While the quality of service should be the primary factor when choosing a DevOps provider, companies should also look into a provider’s culture and core values.

Often, the culture and values of a provider seep into their offerings. Providers with a strong culture offer meaningful services, and providers who lack culture or strong values often offer suboptimal services. 

Security and Compliance

Security and compliance shouldn’t be overlooked under any circumstances. This is because security breaches and compliance failures can potentially bankrupt a business. Therefore, a service provider must provide bulletproof security and robust compliance protocols. Reviewing case studies and testimonials from past clients is an excellent way to vet service providers and check their security and compliance track record.

Are you looking to outsource your DevOps project to a specialist provider?

Let's Talk!

Challenges and Risks of DevOps Outsourcing and How to Mitigate Them

As mentioned above, DevOps outsourcing has a few challenges that companies must tackle. One of the main challenges of DevOps outsourcing is a lack of control and oversight.

Businesses that are used to in-house teams and complete visibility might find a move to outsourced DevOps services a bit jarring. That being said, the best service providers work closely with businesses to ensure that visibility isn’t a problem.

Outsourcing involves professionals from all corners of the world. Therefore, language differences and cultural barriers are issues that companies might face. Providers like rinf.tech, with their robust delivery ecosystem, are a perfect solution to these challenges. We offer options across continents so businesses can choose locations in the same time zone and with closer cultural proximity to their home base.

When companies outsource DevOps projects, there’s always the risk of poor quality and performance, especially if they work with the wrong vendor.

The simple fix to that problem is committing time and researching to find the vendor with the most impressive credentials and performance history. Poor quality and performance often include security and compliance failures. Security and compliance will be taken care of by choosing the best vendors.

Emerging Trends and Technologies in DevOps Outsourcing

One of the most ominous and frequently cited statistics is the cost of a data breach in 2022. The global average was $4.35 million. For certain industries like healthcare, that amount rose to $10.10 million. Security is the most important pillar of a business, and that’s why DevSecOps is one of the foremost emerging trends in DevOps outsourcing. A company’s success will increase multifold if security can be folded into every aspect of development and operations.

AI and automation technologies are taking over the world. DevOps is an excellent example of AI technologies being used most effectively. Adopting automation is the best way a company can future-proof itself and dominate its industry.

Cloud computing and cloud-native infrastructure is becoming the norm for many companies. Traditional data centers aren’t providing the cost-savings, efficiency, and security that businesses in the modern world require. Thousands of major companies are permanently settling in cloud-native infrastructure. Cloud-native DevOps via Kubernetes and other containerized orchestrations are among DevOps’s major evolving technologies.

In the world of cloud computing are those companies who adopt multi-cloud or hybrid cloud architectures. Therefore, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud DevOps tools, technologies, and strategies are also set to dominate this next chapter of the DevOps saga. The future of DevOps is vibrant and full of limitless possibilities.

Conclusion

DevOps is a methodology that can help companies from different backgrounds rise above competitors and make a difference in their respective sectors. For many, outsourcing their DevOps is a great way to reap its benefits without sacrificing significant portions of IT budgets.

Outsourcing DevOps is perfect for companies that lack in-house DevOps experience and that seek cost-savings and scalability. In addition, any company that wants to leverage exciting new technologies, furnish short-term projects, or require 24/7 support should outsource its DevOps.

However, companies should factor in expertise, delivery ecosystems, budgets, delivery models, communication and collaboration services, security and compliance track records, and company values to choose the best solution provider. Together, those attributes form the ultimate DevOps solution provider.

Experts like rinf.tech can help businesses tackle the challenges of DevOps outsourcing. This includes poor performance, lack of visibility, security and compliance collapse, and cultural barriers. With the rise of DevSecOps, AI tools, cloud-native infrastructures, and hybrid and multi-cloud models, DevOps is booming. To ensure success, enterprises must follow the best practices listed above when outsourcing their DevOps operations.

Looking for a technology partner?

Let’s talk.

Related Articles

software development outsourcing guide 2023
outsourcing

A Complete Guide to IT Outsourcing in 2023

This guide is designed to provide you with the necessary knowledge and tools to make informed decisions and achieve successful outcomes in IT Outsourcing.

April 14, 2023

The post DevOps Outsourcing Best Practices in 2023 appeared first on rinf.tech.

]]> Top 6 Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies https://www.rinf.tech/top-6-cloud-cost-optimization-strategies/ Wed, 06 Jul 2022 11:02:28 +0000 https://www.rinf.tech/?p=18777 This article shares top six strategies that prove to be effective when it comes to cloud cost optimization.

The post Top 6 Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies appeared first on rinf.tech.

]]>

Top 6 Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies

As businesses continue to digitally transform and build in the cloud, cost optimization is increasingly a major issue for most companies.

Although major cloud services providers offer increased flexibility and seamless scalability, cloud costs are challenging to understand and track.

As such, it’s critical to adopt cloud cost optimization strategies to clear up the confusion and control cloud costs while maximizing cloud usage and efficiencies. This approach helps enterprises better manage their cloud infrastructure and services from providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.

As every small business won’t remain small, thinking big helps lead to better planning, providing unique insights, and hopefully some big wins.

In this article, we’ll share top six strategies that prove to be effective when it comes to cloud cost optimization.

Contents

What is Cloud Cost Optimization?

Cloud cost optimization is an approach that identifies the most cost-effective way to run applications and workloads on the cloud. It looks at providing the most business value at the lowest possible cost.

Cloud optimization strategies range from simple business management strategies to complex engineering and scientific techniques like decision science and analytics, forecasting, modeling, and so on.

Key benefits of cloud cost optimization include:

  • Decreased costs
  • Enhanced efficiency
  • Enhanced visibility
  • Performance optimization
  • Predictability

 

Organizations can avoid surprises down the road by understanding potential hidden cloud costs. Businesses also risk choosing the wrong cloud service without a cloud cost optimization strategy.

Why is Cloud Cost Optimization Difficult?

The pay-per-use cloud computing model comes with a whole host of benefits like freedom and flexibility for engineering teams. But these benefits come at a price that can be hefty at times.

Cloud services providers don’t make reducing or understanding cloud costs easier. In fact, just the simple act of deciphering a cloud bill is often daunting and sometimes intimidating.

So, it’s no surprise that cloud cost optimization continues to be a top priority for organizations for the fifth year in a row.

Last year, as many as 61% of organizations planned to optimize cloud costs. Another 76% measures cloud progress according to cost efficiency.

Effective Cloud Cost optimization strategies

1. Cloud Native Design

It’s crucial to design and build enterprise systems cost-efficiently. You must leverage available capabilities in your unique cloud environment to employ every cost advantage.

For example, you can leverage auto-scaling and only pay for the servers actively running in the data center server pool. Auto-scaling ensures that cloud capacity is already paid for and is not used excessively.

But leveraging a cloud-native design is not straightforward. You have to read the whitepapers, architectural best practices, and documentation to get the most bang for your buck.

If you already have in-house staff with the necessary skills and experience, adapting available cloud infrastructure designs to best suit your goals shouldn’t be too challenging.

However, it’s imperative to get clarity over functional vs. non-functional requirements. It’s important to note that optimizing purely to lower costs will impact performance and quality. So, finding a balance while designing your cloud infrastructure is vital.

cloud native apps vs traditional apps

Image source: alibabacloud.com

2. Find Unused and Idle Resources

One of the easiest ways to reduce cloud costs is to find and eliminate unused resources. Administrators and developers often set up temporary servers or storage services to perform certain cloud functions. Whenever they fail to switch off or erase these resources with terminated instances, you’re going to pay unnecessarily.

Once you have identified and removed unused resources, you have to make it a regular undertaking to keep costs down. Similarly, find idle resources and consolidate computing jobs into fewer instances to ensure cloud optimization.

Are you looking to build a Cloud-native/agnostic application and/or optimize your Cloud costs with a reliable partner?

Let's Talk!

3. Capacity Reservation and Volume Discounts

On-demand capacity reservations and reserved instances will feel like you’re moving your data center back on-premises. But it’s worth the effort as these forecasts will concentrate on baseline utilization and provide an opportunity to pay upfront for the cloud capacity you will surely use.

This approach creates opportunities to leverage discounts offered by cloud services providers. Some volume-based discounts are significant, and it’s definitely worth exploring to understand your available options better. But don’t fall into the trap of overprovisioning.

4. Leverage Real-Time Monitoring and Heat Maps

Real-time monitoring will alert you to out-of-band spending and unexpected surges. By closely tracking cost anomalies, organizations can quickly address potential expense issues before it destroys the budget.

Heat maps also help optimize cloud costs by showing the difficulties related to computing demands. For example, companies can leverage this information regularly to establish and automate start and stop times for their development servers.

Although administrators can do this manually, using automation and heat map tools are more advantageous. At the same time, different teams within the organization should also be responsible and held accountable for cloud budgeting, tracking, and spending.

We can do this by creating individual cloud accounts for each team or department. While this approach is beneficial, it’s critical to mandate a standard method for identifying cloud resource ownership.

As resource naming standards often fail, use resource tags or labels to add additional properties and differentiate them. Think of it as the cloud equivalent to barcode labels. As retroactive active tags are challenging and resource-intensive, try to do this in advance.

ring.tech case: building and optimizing a Cloud-agnostic application to support scaling in a cost-effective way

Hanhaa, a global IoT supply chain visibility and cargo company, once turned to us with a request to build a Cloud-agnostic enterprise platform that includes 3 main components (web portal, APIs, device trackers), all running on Google Cloud, AWS and Azure IoT.

The solution was to become the company’s key market differentiator.

As the client was completing the 1st phase of software prototyping and development that had successfully attracted investors and demonstrated the capabilities of the platform, they were looking for a provider that could get their product to the enterprise level and help optimize Cloud expenses.

Based on the client’s current architecture, our software engineering team proposed and implemented the following architectural improvements:

  • Redesigned the entire development and deployment workflow;
  • Introduced automated testing;
  • Refactored and improved new features development and code  for existing functionalities;
  • Improved security;
  • Established a performance assessment action plan.

 

On top of that, we optimized Cloud to ensure Hanhaa can run their CRM solution in a cost-effective way.

Feel free to check out this case story to learn more about the project and how it benefitted our client.

5. Get the Right Data, at the Right Time, to the Right People

While we constantly strive to collect more data, more data isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes some of your problems might result from collecting and storing too much data. So, it’s important to understand what types of data you’re collecting, how it will be used, and by whom.

Knowing this information will help you clear the noise that often accompanies extraneous data. For example, DevOps teams need the ability to compare and contrast and look backward. This helps them understand what’s broken or where an anomaly originated. So, they must always have access to granular data they can slice and dice.

However, finance teams often need to look ahead than look back. They want to make future financial projections. This means that although both DevOps and finance teams are looking at the same data, they need to look at it in different formats that best match their roles.

By giving access to the right data, to the right people, at the right time, we can go a long way to reducing waste and controlling cloud costs.

 

6. Make Cloud Cost Optimization a Routine Task

To continue to cut cloud costs and access savings, make cloud cost optimization a routine exercise. The best approach here is to standardize best practices for cloud operations and assign the responsibility of cloud governance to an individual or team to ensure consistency, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Bottom Line

By maintaining cloud efficiency, you can avert racking up unexpected costs without anyone noticing it. As you can see, there’s a bunch of stuff going on, and you have to make lots of difficult decisions. The best way forward is to prioritize actions by observing cloud operations and related spending.

To get the most value, investigate potential trade-offs between costs, dependability, performance, and redundancy. Start the conversation with cloud vendors and seek out bulk discounts.

Although this process is far from straightforward, it gets easier over time. So, don’t waste another minute without reaping the benefits of cloud cost optimization. With a little bit of effort and routine practice, you can save big on your next cloud budget.

Looking for a technology partner?

Let’s talk.

Related Articles

rinf.tech and Intel partnership
ai

Inside rinf.tech’s 8-Year Partnership with Intel on Hardware-Software Integration and Open Source – Powering Cloud, IoT and AI

This article examines how rinf.tech’s 8-year partnership with Intel has advanced open-source innovation by addressing real-world challenges in cloud, IoT, and AI ecosystems. It highlights joint contributions to improve workload performance, enhance IoT sensor integrations, and optimize computer vision using OpenCV and OpenVINO. Read more into how these contributions deliver measurable value to the global developer community and accelerate enterprise adoption of scalable, reliable technologies.

September 11, 2025

The post Top 6 Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies appeared first on rinf.tech.

]]> Top 6 Trends That Influence DevSecOps Adoption in 2022 https://www.rinf.tech/top-6-trends-that-influence-devsecops-adoption-in-2022/ Fri, 15 Apr 2022 12:46:48 +0000 https://www.rinf.tech/?p=18100 This article explores six trends that are driving DevSecOps evolution and affecting its adoption among technology teams and companies in 2022.

The post Top 6 Trends That Influence DevSecOps Adoption in 2022 appeared first on rinf.tech.

]]>

Top 6 Trends That Influence DevSecOps Adoption in 2022

In the software engineering universe, DevOps is now a standard that accelerates software development and helps optimize the software development lifecycle (SDLC), save costs, streamline processes and more.

The DevOps approach optimizes continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines while ensuring high software quality. However, although in the past, DevOps helped accelerate time to market, security issues popped up often and demanded an immediate response.

That response was DevSecOps! DevSecOps was created based on DevOps methodologies and extended to address reliability assurance and code quality issues. In this scenario, when DevOps teams embed security controls early in the SLDC, they can continuously monitor and resolve potential security issues during each iteration, improving both time to market and software quality.

However, DevSecOps hasn’t evolved into an industry standard just yet. But the good news is that 2022 promises to be the year of extensive DevSecOps adoption.

This article will explore six trends that drive DevSecOps evolution and affect its adoption among technology teams and companies in 2022.

Contents

1. Software Supply Chain Attacks

Software supply chain attacks continue to be a key driver of DevSecOps adoption. According to a recent study conducted by CrowdStrike, as many as 45% of respondents’ organizations experienced at least one software supply chain attack over the last year (up from 32% in 2018). Even worse, as much as 59% of organizations that fell victim to a software supply chain attack for the first time did not even have a response strategy.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed by enterprises across industries. Business customers now demand transparency into application tools, libraries, and processes the software development team leveraged before introducing them into their trusted cloud environments.

The explosion of supply chain attacks last year also highlights the importance of supply chain security. However, not everyone has done enough to secure software supply chains, and these attacks will continue for the foreseeable future.

In this case, DevSecOps will encourage DevOps teams to concentrate on tools and best practices that help secure the code, software infrastructure, and (now) supply chains. When they shift left and embed security in the code early on, they reduce the attack surface and significantly mitigate the risk of a breach. In this case, the development team can simplify all compliance efforts while substantially cutting down the time to remediation.

Catching potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations during the SLDC helps save money. This approach also empowers developers to build robust applications securely, reliably, and quickly. As such, the benefits of DevSecOps adoption can’t be ignored.

2. Integrated Security Testing

The need for integrated security measures will drive DevSecOps adoption in 2022. Although testing is part of the DevOps cycle, software development teams often focus on only unit and functional testing.

As integrated security testing gains momentum, we can expect more security tests as part of the testing suite. For example, testing for injections, request forgeries, and much more. As the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption, the threat level is also now higher than ever before.

Today, integrated security testing is critical to organizations shifting left. For example, they must identify and rectify vulnerabilities before deploying applications into production. This approach will also help enhance brand value as end-users won’t have to contend with bugs or potential downtime.

3. The Adoption of CloudOps

CloudOps enables the efficient management of cloud-hosted applications and the underlying infrastructure. CloudOps essentially allows DevOps teams to validate processes that will implement applications and best practices in the cloud.

As the consumption of resources is highly cost-effective, we can expect the adoption of CloudOps to grow exponentially over the months ahead. Furthermore, enterprises will also release more cloud-based applications and tools that support their implementation.

Organizations following the CloudOps model will be more agile and flexible to adapt to the ever-changing technological landscape. In this case, DevSecOps will help CloudOps teams optimize security, performance monitoring protocols, cloud governance, capacity planning, and much more.

Are you looking to hire a dedicated DevOps / DevSecOps team for your project?

Contact us

4. Rising GitOps Adoption

Developer experiences are at the heart of GitOps. This is because Git lets you leverage version control systems and enables the seamless management of infrastructure and configurations.

GitOps best practices, like DevOps, depend on CI/CD pipelines and code reviews to get the most out of them. This approach helps developers automate the entire infrastructure provisioning process. The Git repository will store all the source code and files.

You can also add the same principles to Kubernetes clusters, cloud apps, and server infrastructure. What’s more, GitOps, together with DevSecOps, will make it easier to hold development teams accountable by establishing a single source of truth for them to follow.

For example, DevOps teams have the opportunity to identify and rectify bugs or potential divergences sooner, helping the team shift security further left. Whenever developers leverage this approach, it helps minimize downtimes and accelerates dependable deployments.

As Git is a popular configuration management tool, your deployment teams probably use it already. To support infrastructure as code in the Git repository, all they must do is configure the CI/CD pipeline. The same applies to adding an infrastructure repo into the delivery pipeline.

hire DevSecOps team How DevSecOps works

5. The Growth of Microservice Architecture

The shift from massive, inflexible systems that limit compatibility to lightweight, agile software has increased DevOps and DevSecOps adoption. As architectures such as containers become mainstream, it’s now easier than ever for developers to code, debug and deploy software quickly and work collaboratively. 

Microservice architecture offers the benefit of quickly installing, running, and maintaining systems and is a catalyst to greater DevOps adoption. Containers, on the other hand, spur DevSecOps adoption.

6. Explosion of Zero-Day Attacks

Zero-day exploits used to occur because of poor code quality and advanced techniques employed by threat actors. However, these days, hackers don’t spend time pouring over lines of code to find flaws or find unpatched vulnerabilities. Instead, they tailor their malware code for it. 

So, we can expect more bots looking for disclosed vulnerabilities before the implementation of patches at specific organizations. Until DevSecOps is the norm, we can expect more successful zero-day attacks.

DevSecOps is the best way forward. This is because DevSecOps methodologies consistently strive to improve open-source code management protocols. They can also keep their code clean by leveraging security tools that can automatically scan open-source code for vulnerabilities. Once complete, they can compare it with legitimate and trustworthy vulnerability databases.

By regularly monitoring security updates and conducting inventory checks, DevSecOps teams can keep up with the latest patches and updates to mitigate the risk of zero-day exploitations.

DevSecOps will continue to evolve, pivot, and drive significant digital transformation. This approach will help optimize processes and help businesses achieve their goals much faster.

How we at rinf.tech ensure secure software development with DevSecOps

Our DevSecOps teams collaborate with the Client’s in-house information security team (or team contracted from a third party partner) and DevOps and engineering teams to identify the needs for development solutions and address security issues and potential threats.

Our DevSecOps consultants work with Scrum Masters, Business Analysts, and software developers to facilitate the flow of continuous development through a secure, stable CD/CI pipeline. 

CI/CD pipeline bridges the gaps between development and operation teams by enforcing automation of application development, testing and deployment. It allows manual processes to be automated and provides other benefits such as:

  • higher code quality,
  • flexibility to deploy/rollback without impeding other people’s work,
  • numerous deployments.

In collaboration with DevOps team, DevSecOps covers Security Unit Tests and static application security testing (SAST).

Looking for a technology partner?

Let’s talk.

Related Articles

xops-strategy
software services

Unified XOps Strategy for Enterprise Agility

In this article, we’ll explore the current Ops landscape, why unifying these disciplines through XOps is so powerful, how to implement XOps successfully, and how it can unlock new levels of enterprise agility.

March 31, 2025

The post Top 6 Trends That Influence DevSecOps Adoption in 2022 appeared first on rinf.tech.

]]> When to Modernize a Legacy System: Telltale Signs and Best Practices https://www.rinf.tech/when-to-modernize-a-legacy-system-telltale-signs-and-best-practices/ Mon, 20 Dec 2021 18:58:21 +0000 https://www.rinf.tech/?p=16128 This article explores when it's high time for any organization to sound the alarm and consider modernizing their legacy software and how to do it right.

The post When to Modernize a Legacy System: Telltale Signs and Best Practices appeared first on rinf.tech.

]]>

When to Modernize Your Legacy System: Telltale Signs and Best Practices

Or How to Pay Your Tech Debt With a Minimum Interest Rate

As per Synopsys research, the operation and maintenance of legacy software have contributed $520 billion to the total cost of poor-quality software ($1.5 trillion) in 2021.

According to Gartner, 72% of companies allocate separate budgets just to "keep the lights on" and maintain their out-of-date software systems.

A recent survey by RealWire has found that 87% of IT decision-makers believe legacy software exposes their business to cyber security threats and vulnerabilities. According to Snaplogic, organizations' overreliance on legacy systems will be the biggest barrier to digital transformation in 2022.

Legacy systems contribute a great deal to the accumulation of technical debt, whose elimination can be detrimental for any business’s top line if done incorrectly.

This article will explore when it’s high time for any organization to sound the alarm and consider modernizing their legacy software, what effective strategies exist and how to choose the right one with data protection, scalability, and the user in mind.

Contents

What is legacy software and why do businesses use it?

A legacy software system is an obsolete technology that is still used in business. Legacy systems often run for years, unable to meet the ever-changing customer demands and costing companies a fortune in maintenance. Many legacy systems no longer receive support from their vendors, severely limiting their efficiency and providing no business value.

As employees come and go, the expertise of legacy systems can deteriorate, which, along with the loss of documentation, increases the likelihood of critical system failures.

The criteria below serve as a checklist for determining a legacy system.

  • Your software system cannot meet the organization’s current and/or future business needs and market challenges.
  • You require software engineers with an obsolete/hard-to-find/expensive technology skillset.
  • Your system requires high maintenance costs.
  • Your system performance is poor: slow, unscalable, and redundant.
  • It isn’t easy to build new features due to no in-house expertise and talent.
  • Vendors no longer support the system.
  • Your legacy application isn’t compatible with custom big data, AI/ML, or IoT solutions.

 

A 2020 report from the U.S. General Accounting Office identified ten industries and verticals still heavily reliant on legacy software. Retail, eCommerce, and manufacturing top the list.

Common reasons for refusing to modernize obsolete applications include, but aren’t limited to the following.

  • System modernization can be expensive, often requiring significant up-front investment and capital expenditures.
  • New technologies can require costly and lengthy training programs to quickly get users up to speed.
  • Management is unsure which modernization strategy is best for their needs or particular business case.
  • Stakeholders fear time-lapse migration of outdated versions, data loss, and operational disruptions.
  • System requirements can be challenging to scale, overwhelming staff in decision making.
  • No buy-in from senior leadership in “traditional” non-tech-driven enterprises, especially if they’re slow tech adopters on a personal level.
  • Lack of awareness about cybersecurity risks posed by outdated applications.

When is it high time to modernize legacy software?

There’re telltale signs that your legacy application badly needs s serious upgrade. Here to name just a few.

Your legacy system is highly vulnerable to cyber security risks

Online security threats grow and become more sophisticated every day. Business is the favorite target of hackers because they have a lot to lose. Data – a real asset in any business – can be easily compromised if not properly secured. 

The Cost of Poor Software Quality In the U.S.: a 2022 Report by Synopsys found that in 2022, poor-quality software cost American companies about  $2.41 trillion. Legacy software and technical debt factored into that staggering amount, along with failed software development projects and cybercrimes caused by exploitable software vulnerabilities.

Today, there are so many threats that antivirus and security systems should be updated every day to ensure they never get hacked. For many businesses, it’s a must to have a dedicated team of cyber security experts to ensure corporate systems are running smoothly with a high level of protection. On top of that, to decrease software products’ exposure to cyber threats, it’s highly recommended that cybersecurity be embedded into the software design as early in SDLC as possible.

Actions like encrypting your data, using the correct channels to transfer data, and restricting access will save you money and protect you from many internal and external problems. However, it’s next to impossible to achieve a high level of security with legacy systems.

Your legacy system is no longer supported by its vendor

When a legacy system manufacturer goes out of business or discontinues supporting your legacy solution for other reasons, it’s just a matter of time before it comes highly inflexible, irresponsive, redundant, and vulnerable to threats.

Even if your system offers regular fixes and updates, they may not be enough to block the sophisticated tools used by modern cybercriminals.

Moreover, if you have legacy code, you will likely find this code very complex and difficult to read and understand. Legacy code is often referred to as “spaghetti code,” i.e., one that’s changed many times by different people over many years, hasn’t been documented properly, or doesn’t follow modern coding standards and rules. Such code leads to many errors and inconsistencies, causing bugs and issues, affecting usability, slowing down performance, etc.

In many cases, rewriting the entire code is the most feasible solution that will eventually cost you less than fixing the messy legacy code.

Tweet

Your legacy software is incompatible with third-party solutions and is unscalable

Old technologies rarely integrate successfully with new ones. The combination of incompatible systems often creates loopholes that cannot be successfully overcome, opening up security risks for your business and slowing things down. It’s usually better to upgrade than try to piece together incompatible systems.

As the company grows, the functionality of a software solution changes. Software should grow and evolve at the same rate. One of the risks of retaining legacy software is that it may not adapt or expand to meet new business needs.

For instance, in the case of retail, legacy solutions are highly unscalable, meaning they can’t cope with the rapidly growing business audience. Once your business starts attracting thousands of users, the software should be optimized to handle massive traffic of concurrent users. Failure to do so can kill your business as it’ll negatively affect usability and disrupt loyalty.

You’re facing compliance challenges

If your industry requires regulatory compliance, your legacy system may be lagging behind. General rules requiring strict adherence to established guidelines and standards include:

  • GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
  • HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
  • GLBA (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) 
  • CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act)
  • SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act),
  • MISRA (Motor Industry Software Reliability Association),
  • ISO 26262 (Road vehicles – Functional safety) and many more.

 

Failure to comply with relevant industry regulations can pose a significant risk to your business continuity.

Your legacy system isn’t optimized to work with big data

Data is the new oil. Modern companies collect all kinds of data and analyze it to do their job faster and more efficiently. One of the most significant benefits of using data is informed decision-making. Data-driven decisions aren’t based on guesswork, but on past knowledge and experience and customer insights.

For proper data collection, processing, analysis, and decision-making, you have to harness the power of data science and emerging technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, cloud, or IoT. Modern big data solutions are incompatible with legacy systems. As such, outdated software robs you of the ability to leverage the full power of your data.

Your legacy software requires developers with obsolete tech skillsets

Let’s say your legacy solution is based on COBOL or other pretty outdated tech stacks that only a small cohort of engineers are skilled in. Finding engineers to replace someone on the team will be time-consuming and require efforts your recruitment team may not be able to cope with. In addition, this will add up costs to your software maintenance budget.

While today’s competition for software development talent is tough all over the world, it’s still easier and less expensive to tap into mainstream tech skill pools. In addition, switching to modern tech stacks will allow you to jump on the emerging tech bandwagon and capitalize on advanced technologies to ensure future readiness for your business.

Are you looking to hire expert consultants to help you with legacy system modernization, cloud migration, or scalability improvement?

Contact us!

Legacy system modernization benefits

  • Faster time-to-market
  • Better customer service
  • Increased efficiency
  • Reduced risk and better application security
  • Better competitiveness
  • Flexibility and scalability
  • Better use of software engineering talent

 

So, what options do you have for modernizing legacy applications? Should software systems be upgraded and maintained, should they migrate to a new infrastructure, or should they be rebuilt from scratch?

Let’s understand the difference.

Legacy sofware modernization methods and approaches

All legacy modernization approaches fall into two main categories based on the strategy used in the transformation process. It can be revolutionary or evolutionary, depending on the structural change made to the legacy system.

Revolutionary method

In a revolutionary method, the old system is completely replaced by a new one, developed from scratch. This helps avoid security breaches, address poor system performance or enable complex third-party integrations and scalability. This method may apply to older monolithic systems where it’s impossible to change a single block without changing the entire system. For an application to be scalable, it must be modular, or even better, reworked using a Cloud and microservice-based architecture.

However, this strategy has a downside, as it may involve risks and potential disruptions to the regular business operations. It can also be more expensive.

Evolutionary method

The evolutionary method is less painful since it doesn’t require shutting down the entire system. It implies replacing one component at a time without disrupting routine business processes. This method is less risky, but it can be extended over time and cause more pain in the neck than lead to benefits.

Whichever transformation method you choose will be critical to secure your place among the best-performing companies on the market. Legacy software modernization will bring advanced, connected technology and IoT innovation to your business, which 60% of CEOs believe will also play an important role in their company’s digital strategy.

Once you have decided which path you would like to take to modernize your legacy system, you can choose an approach based on the degree of impact and complexity.

The following approaches are ranked from the simplest and least risky (evolutionary method) to those with the greatest impact on your business processes (revolutionary method).

Encapsulation

Encapsulation is one of the most economical and fastest methods. It reuses the core components of a legacy application by encapsulating its data and functions and making them available through the API. Encapsulation provides a new interface to an existing legacy system but doesn’t address maintenance issues. So this is a good option if the legacy application has well-written code, high business value, and still functions as expected.

Re-hosting

Re-hosting means redeploying an application to a different physical, virtual, or cloud infrastructure without changing code or functionality. This method is also one of the most economical, fast, low-risk and helps resolve support issues. It doesn’t negatively impact the business, and the system functions the same way at the end of the process.

While moving to the cloud with a re-hosting technique doesn’t fully leverage cloud functionality, it still provides better security and the ability to deploy continuous updates. It should also be noted that re-hosting isn’t the only way to transition from legacy to the cloud; this is also possible through re-platforming or refactoring.

Re-platforming

Re-platforming allows you to migrate a legacy application or its components to a new platform with minimal code changes. It leaves the structure of the code and the existing functions unchanged. This option is ideal for business owners concerned that their clients will not adapt to the new system. The advantage of migrating to the legacy cloud with the platform change technique is that it optimizes costs and offers basic cloud functionality. Although this approach requires less effort than refactoring, it can still offer the main benefits of the cloud.

Refactoring

The refactoring method optimizes existing code without changing the behavior of the legacy application. Refactoring involves changing back-end elements to ensure a smooth migration from legacy to the cloud. This helps you take full advantage of cloud functionality and move from containers to microservices. This approach effectively reduces technical debt, increases productivity, and improves system flexibility.

Re-architecting

Re-architecting is a more advanced approach to modernizing a legacy system that entails creating new architecture and changing the code. This method allows for significant improvement of the application’s functionality, letting you take advantage of the best features of the new technology stack. It also simplifies the process of introducing new features.

Re-architecting is an effective solution to address performance and scalability issues.

Rebuilding

A rebuild or redesign is rewriting legacy application code from scratch into a completely new cloud environment. This approach is used when it’s necessary to preserve the scope and characteristics of a legacy application. Rebuilding has many technical benefits, such as introducing DevOps, microservices, containers, service grids, etc. This is one of the longest-running methods that requires many changes to the system, which is considered risky, but the benefits outweigh the risks.

At the end of the modernization process, the business gets a technologically advanced and flexible solution with higher performance and lower operating costs.

Replacement

In this case, it’s best to uninstall the application and replace it entirely, creating a system that better serves the current business needs. Replacing a system with a custom-built new system requires a significant amount of planning, but this is a sure winner in terms of fully meeting new business needs.

 

One of the leading banking and FinTech companies has once turned to us for help upgrading their legacy systems and automating their global banking workflows.

The goal of legacy software modernization was to address the following challenges fast and effectively:

  • lack of risk data accuracy and integrity for credit decisions,
  • high fragmentation of legacy systems,
  • non-automated workflow support for Structured Credit Analysis,
  • process breaks, manual workarounds/inefficiencies,
  • lack of transparency and traceability of processes and data for Lending & Deposits,
  • lack of real-time monitoring,
  • slow and inconsistent pricing exception approval tracking and execution.

 

As a result of our collaboration on legacy systems modernization and custom business process integration layer development, the client managed to achieve the following benefits:

  • 6-digit figure yearly cost savings,
  • Increasing business process visibility and integrity,
  • 15% increase in customer response rates,
  • 35% reduced effort spent on platform monitoring and cross-systems health checks and redundant work tasks,
  • New DataModel corporate strategic objectives linked to KPIs and automatic reporting,
  • 20% faster time to market,
  • Improved customer service quality and regularoty compliance.

 

Proceed to this link to learn more about this project. 

   

Choosing the right approach to legacy software upgrade

Now, you may be wondering how to choose the right legacy modernization method.

Well, the answer is simple – choose the modernization approach that will maximize your business value with the least amount of effort. You must consider the amount of transformation you would like to bring about in your system as well as the risks and costs to be involved.

To simplify your legacy modernization, we advise you to focus on re-architecting, rebuilding, or replacing your system, as these are the most effective options to consider.

Assess your system, prioritize what needs to be done according to the target user and market research, and start upgrading. And keep in mind that you can always consult with technical experts like rinf.tech to help you make the right choice and accompany you throughout your legacy modernization journey.

While most organizations face challenges on the path to legacy system upgrades, many are pretty successful in dealing with them. Our customers are no exception. 

If you’re looking for legacy modernization best practices, the step-by-step plan below may get you on the right track.

Evaluate your legacy system

For a full legacy system assessment, start at the software level. No matter how modern your software is, it may still not meet your current business requirements. Also, think about your future business plans and see if your software will fit your future goals.

Based on your assessment, select the approach that best suits your needs. 

If necessary, navigate to existing products that you can use. There’s no need to develop an application if an existing SaaS solution is available at a lower cost. But if your system requires a specific solution with additional functions, go for a custom product development.

Define success

Don’t take the path of legacy modernization without defining measurable success rates and KPIs. Set clear goals so your dedicated software team knows what to focus on during the process. Some of the good examples of such goals are:

  • Maintenance costs reduction by X% one year after the release of an updated and revamped solution;
  • X% increase in staff productivity;
  • Increase product uptime from X% to X% in 3 months after the release;
  • Install rate increase for new clients from X% to X%.

 

Software performance is one of the most effective metrics to watch out. It easily demonstrates how the solution refactoring has impacted functionality and can clearly indicate a successful transformation. 

Choose the most viable approach

Choose the retrofit approach that gives you the results you want with the least effort and in the shortest possible time. Determine which parts of the current system you want to save and reuse if they have unique value, or consider turnkey solutions if they can cover that need for less money. For instance, in the case of CRM systems, it may be cheaper to take your current outdated system out of service and build a new solution from scratch.

Explore the existing solutions

Look for existing technology solutions to help you accelerate your future growth. There’re many SaaS products currently available for a wide array of purposes. Custom software development is an alternative if the tasks you need to complete are unique to your business.

Choose the right technology

Once you’ve identified your business goals, you need to choose the right, future-ready technology stack to help you achieve them. You might want to opt for cloud migration for improved speed, remote access, and scalability. Consider a microservices architecture if you currently have a monolithic application and want to speed time to market, make your product scalable, improve security, and introduce new features fast. You might also consider testing for performance, changing the look, implementing event-driven design, and more.

Create cloud migration strategy

Most modern software solutions are based on big data, and working with large datasets requires robust computing, storage and networking, and the ability to scale on demand. Some enterprises choose complete cloud migration to meet their IT infrastructure needs. Others opt for a hybrid cloud model — performing their most business-critical operations on-premises and moving less-critical processes to the cloud.

Create a “retirement plan”

Either way, you won’t give up using legacy software right away. Some upgrade methods might involve encapsulating its components for use in upgraded systems. You will also need access to documents and data until you set up a workable plan for migrating data from a legacy system. Create a “retirement plan” and determine how long you plan to maintain your old system until a modernized one comes along.

Plan for future upgrades

Upgrades often crash, so it’s best to plan for the downtime associated with the modernization. They’re also quite expensive, so budget ahead of time for tech upgrades.

Final thoughts

No matter how complex and multifaceted your legacy system modernization may seem, it should not deem as a one-time initiative. Today, technology is changing at a breakneck pace, so organizations are more likely to benefit if they perceive this as a cycle.

Plan every step you take carefully, do painstaking research and hire outside experts with tribal knowledge, sufficient bandwidth, access to robust infrastructure, and an available talent pool to help you jump fast on the newest tech bandwagon fast and cost-effectively. It can take time and investment, but it will help you get your technology modernization done smoothly and painlessly.

Looking for a technology partner?

Let’s talk.

The post When to Modernize a Legacy System: Telltale Signs and Best Practices appeared first on rinf.tech.

]]>