Case Study
Global manufacturer accelerates enterprise analytics development cycles by 50% with Azure-based DataOps and DevOps automations
OUR CLIENT
This American multinational apparel company produces clothing for retail brands. With tens of thousands of employees, the company generates billions in revenue annually. The company astutely manages its supply chain to leverage costs, scalability, and flexibility to benefit its retail customers, consumers, and employees.
THE CHALLENGE
Difficulty managing applications and data flows across hybrid environments
With complex data management needs, the company’s IT team struggled to efficiently manage, deploy, and validate applications across on-premises data centers and public cloud environments. Its fragmented infrastructure caused bottlenecks, slowing data flows between different systems and making it difficult to maintain consistent, accurate data across environments. In addition, diminished data quality and a lack of automation prevented the IT team from responding quickly to business needs. As a result, the company experienced significant data silos where critical information was trapped in isolated systems, limiting company leaders from gaining comprehensive insights to make informed decisions. Meanwhile, data validation processes were manual and time-consuming, increasing human error risks and further compromising the quality and reliability of application data.
In addition, a lack of integration between on-premises data centers and the public cloud further complicated IT operations, making it difficult to leverage cloud-native technologies effectively. The IT team also didn’t use automated processes to test and deploy applications in both on-premises and cloud environments, prolonging release cycles and increasing operational costs. This situation had the potential to disrupt business continuity and prevent the company from meeting the diverse needs of its customers. The company also needed to adhere to strict security and compliance requirements, adding another layer of complexity to its operations.
These issues prevented the company from innovating and responding to market demands quickly. The manufacturer needed a solution to integrate its on-premises data centers and public cloud environments, streamline data flows, automate data validation, and improve testing and deployment processes—while keeping security and regulatory compliance in mind.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Implemented DataOps platform and DevOps methodologies to accelerate business solutions
UST delivered a comprehensive DataOps platform, built on Azure Data Factory, to resolve data management and deployment issues across hybrid IT environments. This platform seamlessly integrates data flows to automate and visualize statistical data across the entire infrastructure ecosystem. Azure Data Factory also simplifies workflows, enabling the IT team to easily migrate data to production environments with just a few clicks and significantly reducing data processing and deployment cycles. The user-friendly interface allows the IT team to easily monitor and manage data workflows, providing greater visibility and control over the entire data lifecycle. This visibility helps the manufacturer proactively identify and address potential issues, ensuring smoother operations and reducing downtime. The solution also adheres to stringent privacy and compliance requirements, ensuring data is handled securely across all environments.
Automation tools embedded in the DataOps platform also streamline data validation processes to maintain data quality and consistency throughout the pipeline. These automations minimize the risk of errors and allow the company’s IT team to focus on more strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down by manual data management tasks. The solution also standardizes testing and deployment processes, reducing time-to-market for new applications and features.
In addition to the technical enhancements, UST provided extensive DevOps training and support to the company’s internal teams, equipping people with the skills to adopt and practice CI/CD and agile development methodologies. This training empowered the IT team to fully leverage the new DataOps platform and DevOps approach, improving data management efficiency and accelerating responsiveness to changing business needs. The DevOps transformation also improves collaboration across teams, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
The company can now seamlessly migrate and manage applications and data across both on-premises and cloud environments with minimal effort, tasks it struggled with before. Additionally, data validation, testing, and deployment processes have been automated and standardized, significantly reducing time-to-market and enhancing the overall quality and consistency of applications.
THE IMPACT
Eliminated 75% of manual application and data management processes, reduced development cycles by 50%
The manufacturer experienced significant benefits after the successful implementation of the DataOps platform and DevOps methodologies, including:
- 50% reduction in code deployment, validation, and release cycles—By automating key development and data management processes, developers could iterate and make updates much quicker, boosting the company’s competitive edge.
- 75% automation coverage across various workloads, environments, and teams—By dramatically reducing manual processes to manage applications and data, the company improved operational efficiencies, minimized the risk of human errors, and freed valuable resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- 10+ business data applications modernized—Within six months of the DataOps platform implementation, the IT team modernized the data infrastructure of approximately a dozen applications, increasing scalability, boosting flexibility to meet changing needs, and accelerating the company’s digital transformation journey.
- Streamlined external data acquisition process—By implementing the new framework, the company accelerated the data ingestion process.
- Enhanced visibility and control over data workflows—This improvement in data management led to better decision-making, more efficient resource use, proactive management, and faster issue resolution.
To learn more about our expertise and services to automate and streamline application and data management to unlock innovation, click here.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/insights/what-is-devops-and-where-are-all-the-ops-going