Keeping the lights on for critical national infrastructure

DevOps, Application build and support

The Problem

Operating, securing, and upgrading critical national infrastructure. Even well-designed systems require robust support, especially those serving as a lifeline to citizens. Consider the scenario of a payments run failure or an outage from your cloud provider. When systems integrate across departments and traverse different networks, control over failure modes becomes uncertain. Extensive monitoring is necessary to track and respond to issues before they escalate. Additionally, skilled engineers proficient in the platform are essential for effective support.

The Solution

We collaborated closely with the client to introduce a comprehensive suite of monitoring and alerting across the application. These were continuously updated to incorporate new failure modes and were supported by an extensive library of documentation to aid future engineers in understanding issues. Moreover, we established a framework for incident handling and prioritisation of remediation work.

On a daily basis, we enhanced the automation of our processes, continually improving the service in terms of resiliency, security, and redundancy. This included a prioritisation process to address any security vulnerabilities based on severity.

We provided ongoing support to the business in delivering new features into production. We established and maintained mechanisms to enable the safe deployment of new code into live environments as frequently as the business required.

The Results

The application experiences minimal downtime, remains continually patched for vulnerabilities, and consistently strives for optimal performance. Failures are thoroughly analysed and improved upon, with all findings documented to aid future engineers.