Our client develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware and other products related to the communication and information technology industry worldwide. Additionally, the company offers security products including cloud, email, endpoint, web, and network security; advanced malware protection; and next generation intrusion prevention systems.
Business Challenge
Our client clearly understands that new environments, strategies, and technologies can offer significant benefits—when they are properly applied and operated. The client needed database infrastructure support and database (DB) engineers were essential because they did not have that expertise in-house. This proved to be a difficult task due to the limited number of specialists in this particular area.
Project Description
The client searched for a team of dedicated professionals capable of providing full service solutions—SoftServe was the perfect match. The SoftServe team provided database infrastructure support for the 500+ servers that the database runs on. The team’s main responsibilities included:
- On-call rotations—7 a.m. - 7 p.m. EET
- Incident management—OS reinstalls, other teams' requests including:
- Database creation
- Data migration
- Add users and specific user rights
- Change user passwords
- Creation of reserved copies
- Problem management (repair servers, health checks, etc.)
Additionally, they planned to add big data management to the services that SoftServe supports.
The SoftServe distributed team followed the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)—a detailed set of IT service management practices focused on providing a framework of best practices for organizations. There were four developers—two in the Ukraine and two in the U.S. Typically they worked with Jira requests, which were divided into four priority levels:
- Requests dealt with in one hour
- Requests dealt with in one work day
- Requests dealt with over 2-3 working days
- Request that very rarely occurred
The SoftServe team was responsible for the staffing process; however, the client did take part in candidate interviews. The communication was regular and occurred on a weekly basis. Additionally, the team communicated via messenger and online meeting applications.
Value Delivered
Through the collaboration, the client benefited from the SoftServe’s expertise that was not available in-house. The team provided incident response and problem resolution around the clock.
Additionally, the preference was to staff the engineers from Ukraine since the main development teams also work in Ukraine. This resulted in improved communication and faster problem-solving.