The need for a one-stop-shop

Nowadays, companies that are growing often hire people or acquire businesses that are complementary to each other. Essentially they’re becoming one-stop-shops. You’re looking to design, build and host a website? Sure thing, these one-stop-shops can even do SEO for you or add a marketing touch. What is the exact power behind this setup and how does it help with growing your business? 

From boundaries to agile teamwork

Back in the days, boundaries in IT application landscapes were more present and responsibilities were more clear when it came down to who did what, when and how. Multiple parties were involved to keep systems and applications up and running. Everything was neatly subdivided and made sense. When an error occurred you would first look at the parts you were responsible for and if the issue couldn’t be found there, you would just hand it over to the next in line. If the issue still couldn’t be resolved you then simply pointed out that your part definitely couldn’t be to blame.

Then the cloud made its way into our lives and agile engineering teams were introduced. This new technology and way of work went against all old fashioned principles. How could such a team possess all of the skills to turn requirements into production-ready products? How could an engineering team understand what it means to monitor an infrastructure? How could they be releasing multiple times per day, when really that should go through proper weeks of QA testing and be triple approved by all stakeholders?

Now we know better, as engineering teams are working more independently than ever. Using a cloud platform is a no-brainer and with the introduction of automated pipelines to build and deploy code, they are able to release and achieve a faster time to market.

The need for short lines

More and more we see that these agile project teams need to have a DevOps and SRE engineer on board to help them with setting up pipelines, infrastructures and eventually manage them as well. Short lines are needed to act fast, so that clients don’t lose money. Think about commerce shops for example, that run into a problem and then have to wait for another party to come and solve it. It can take hours or even days to have someone available. Just imagine the loss of revenue…

Saying goodbye to secondary and third parties

The need for short lines introduces the thought of leaving secondary or third parties out of the equation. What remains their value in this whole process? Should engineering teams be dependent on another party that is so far away from them? Does the other party understand the business of the client? And what about reaction times if the engineering team needs help because a pipeline died or the cloud platform is not performing as it should?

It becomes clear that in the previously mentioned situations, eliminating a secondary or third party might be a smart move. Insourcing DevOps & SRE resources will enable organisations with a one-stop-shop that gathers the knowledge of the platform and application under one roof. It eliminates the old fashioned way of work with finger pointing, which eventually costs time and leads to the possibility of losing a client.

A vendor lock-in

Now you might think this introduces some sort of a vendor lock-in. By choosing to work with a company that acts as a one-stop-shop and that becomes responsible for all of your business, it seems impossible to ever leave them. However, with a transparent way of work where industry standards and defaults are implemented, it becomes very easy to transfer to a different one-stop-shop. Even more so, I’m convinced that involving multiple parties with their own way of work, SLA’s and DAP’s is actually what makes everything more complex. A one-stop-shop on the other hand, will help to make sure that your organization or customer will be serviced better and faster.