How can you trust your IT outsourcing provider?

You have doubtlessly heard about the benefits of IT outsourcing for several dozens, if not hundreds, times already. These include better cost-efficiency, instant access to skilled talents from elsewhere, shorter time-to-market for your products or services, and better allocation of your resources and efforts, as you can concentrate on your core business expertise while the professionals deal with some specific tasks.

However, the lack of trust in the IT outsourcing provider is a major issue that stops many companies from outsourcing their services to professionals. IT Svit team works with startups mostly, so we encounter this challenge regularly and solve it by publicly showcasing our project execution strategy and roadmap. Below we explain how we do this.

IT Svit project execution strategy

IT Svit can step in on any stage of your project lifecycle — from refining the idea to MVP development, release and providing long-term infrastructure support and product updates. We work under NDA and SLA, follow the code review best practices and try to automate the routine operations wherever possible by implementing CI/CD pipelines.

1. Assessment of the existing systems. We begin with gathering input from your business stakeholders to build a cohesive picture of the infrastructure, tools and processes already in place. This helps us identify the performance bottlenecks and room for improvement. Once we know what can be done better, we select the performance criteria to be monitored and then offer 3 kinds of solutions:
   - cost-efficient infrastructure and workflows to turn your IT operations into a lean, mean, frugal machine. This helps get MVP development and release done quickly and with minimal expenses;
   - scalable solutions to support ongoing business growth and lay grounds for further product improvements;
   - highly-available systems for long-term business success and scaling to an enterprise.
2. Constant communications. We keep our customers informed on the project progress in multiple ways, from weekly sync-up calls to daily reports in your preferred communication channel like Slack. We list the current roadblocks, things to be discussed and plans for today in the morning and report on the progress done in the evening. This helps us keep our workflows flexible and change project priorities quickly and easily if your business focus shifts. We work in week-long sprints that enable constant value delivery to our customers.
3. Detailed developer documentation. We are a reputed Managed Services Provider and our customers recommend our services to their friends and partners due to our high level of professionalism. We always provide detailed developer documentation for all our projects, starting with infrastructure description and describing the whole set of workflows and functions available within the scope of the project.

We are often asked what would stop us from abusing the customer’s trust and stealing some vital information. We understand that many companies have had a negative experience with IT outsourcing companies in the past and now they are reluctant to trust us. However, our reputation is valuable to us, like yours is to you, and we uphold our end of the bargain. We always sign NDA and SLA agreements to keep both parties legally protected.

According to a global technology consultancy provider Clutch from Washington, D.C., we are among the leaders of the IT outsourcing market in Ukraine, one of the top 3 Managed Services Providers worldwide and are listed among the top 250 Global IT Leaders in 2017–2019 yy. We are also listed as №2 DevOps provider worldwide by GoodFirms — and we are sure to become №1 there with time!

You can simply google for IT Svit customer reviews or ask us for references — we can put you in touch with any of our customers, who will be able to prove our professionalism and high quality of our services.

IT Svit project roadmap

The majority of our customers prefer to run their projects with Amazon Web Services, and this is the brief list of AWS features we use to ensure the security of your projects.

• AWS CloudTrail to enable tracing of all admin actions within the system
• AWS Key Management System to provide data encryption using AWS KMS keys
• AWS CloudWatch Logs, Metrics and Alarms features to provide in-depth monitoring of your environments
• AWS Organizations and AWS Multi-accounts to ensure cost-efficient and secure resource allocation
• Hashicorp Vault for secret management and storing the hashes of sensitive details like credentials
• AWS CodePipeline and open-source alternatives to build CI/CD pipelines and automate most of the routine operations

We follow code review best practices to shift the testing and bug fixing to the left and reduce the risk of post-release crashes nearly to zero. We build multi-staging systems that include the following components:

• local IDEs that can run automated unit and integrity tests at once,
• build and staging environments for high-level testing
• production environments that work under rolling updates, canary deployments or blue-green deployments based on your project needs.

We also implement detailed backup & restore and rollback strategies to minimize the risk of downtime in your operations.

IT Svit is a team of professionals with 10+ years of experience with software development and 5+ years of DevOps expertise and cloud infrastructure management. We are ready to help achieve your business goals — and we guarantee the security of your data.

Originally published at https://itsvit.com on December 30, 2019.