IT Infrastructure Support: Build Reliable Dedicated Teams

Shift Ahead Technologies provides robust IT infrastructure support with a dedicated expert team and proven processes, emphasizing reliability, automation, infrastructure as code, and knowledge transfer for lasting stability.

If​‍​‌‍​‍‌ you head IT Operations or Engineering at a mid-sized company, chances are you have come across the standard offshore pitch: cut your OpEx significantly (up to 30%~60%) by outsourcing support of servers overseas.

The challenge though starts off the next year. Even though the plan seemed solid, it was built on an unjustifiable premise that exactly the same personnel would be at the disposal of your account. Unfortunately, traditional vendors have the practice of shifting workers regularly, and the whole IT sector only keeps 86% to 88% of their staff each year. With each loss of a principal engineer, your most essential expertise disappears as well.

We at Shift Ahead have a different point of view on infrastructure. It's a common misunderstanding that a ticket is a problem solved; we consider that the real essence of support is laying out a solid and reliable framework where the issues don't even have a chance to appear.

The Reality of Scaling Infrastructure

Dedicated team of experts can do just that; below you will find an example of how it was done in case where a dedicated team at Shift Ahead helped a fast-financial-platform-growth customer with scaling up their infrastructure.

The company’s client was managing millions of daily transactions, however, their own SRE team was under extreme pressure. They were having over a thousand daily monitoring alerts and had been used to the vendor offshore who treated the situation as a game of Musical chairs, changing the team all the time, so that even when a person came back, they still could not fully get to grip with hybrid Kubernetes and AWS environment.

Knowing how fast IT staff is changing, even a single person resigning would mean starting the operation from 0, in other words losing a lot of time.

Therefore Shift Ahead implemented a solution where the main delivery factor was an Infrastructure Reliability Pod with only the most qualified engineers.

We have no system of engineer’s pools that are being shared; rather, one client team had a set of engineers assigned permanently and hence, only those who were getting deep down to learn the details, were staying all the ​‍​‌‍​‍‌time.

Step-by-Step:​‍​‌‍​‍‌ Laying the Foundation

Initially, our engineers were reacting to issues one at a time. However, we eventually decided to create durable bricks to support the client's rapid growth and, ultimately, be their backbone.

Step 1: Getting Rid of Toil

We began by doing their telemetry auditing. We discovered that almost half of their lower-level incidents were caused by predictable situations, such as not rotating certificates and doing manual database checks. That is why we concentrated on those problems that kept happening over and over. In this way, we could get rid of that feeling of always having to do the same thing.

Step 2: Going from Manual to Code

Changes made manually lead to differences within the configuration. So, we consolidated all their scripts in one place, version-controlled infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform.

· We laid out unchangeable default setups in their cloud settings, for example.

· We configured automated state verification to prevent unauthorized manual interventions that might lead to outages.

Step 3: Making the Knowledge Code

Each time we made any architectural change or a runbook, we deliberately kept detailed records. It is our responsibility to take out the knowledge that is held by individuals only and store it in a system that is accessible to everyone.

The Bottom Line

In addition to having excellent performance, the team also maintains a strict retention policy where the turnover is kept below 2 percent that helps in our overall performance. As a result, the engineers who have created the systems are still around to manage the automated ones.

Our Success Metrics:

Metric	Before Shift Ahead	After 12 Months
High-Severity Recovery Time	3.5+ Hours	< 40 Minutes
Team Structure	Shared Pool	Dedicated Pod
Knowledge Transfer	Ad-hoc	Documented & Codified

It’s evident there are offshore cost advantages; however, these savings truly can’t come into play unless you are able to retain the staff through year two.

What is the current state of your infrastructure measurement and what is the team attrition you obtain from yearly attrition in your specific ‍‌‍‍‌account?