Softensity’s Global SRE Teams Provide Big Four Firm With 24/7 Support for Tax Platform
Overview
A Big Four accounting firm wanted more comprehensive site reliability engineering services for a complex tax application used for both in-house and client-facing reporting and analysis.
Challenge
Maintaining the reliability of a global tax platform that manages an immense volume of client data proved challenging, and the complex app required a high level of production support. In addition to requiring around-the-clock SRE support, the firm wanted a team with experience in Azure and production support, and hoped to find experts with knowledge of .Net development and Angular.
The Solution
Having successfully collaborated with Softensity’s global teams on various projects, the accounting firm was confident in the consultants’ level of expertise. Softensity provided a robust team of SREs, all of whom have extensive development experience, proficiency in production support, and experience interacting with both users and developers.
The Big Four firm partnered with Softensity teams in Belarus, Latin America, India and the Philippines in order to achieve around-the-clock support. With a background in development, Softensity’s team is able to solve the majority of production incidents without escalation. The team uses various tools to monitor the application, respond to outage alerts, address access issues, and fix broken tools. The SREs also regularly interact with users and frequently walk them through workarounds.
Before sending issues to the development team, the SREs thoroughly investigate the problem, gather data, and provide a comprehensive report. Half of the SRE team’s time is spent anticipating and responding to production and user issues, while the other half is spent on proactive development tasks. These tasks include developing new monitoring strategies, alerts, tests and dashboards, and automating manual tasks.
The Results
Production support for the Big Four firm’s global tax platform has become more sophisticated, flexible and dynamic. A variety of new tests and alerts have been established, while additional support is continuously being developed. Among proactive development tasks, Softensity’s team created a tool to automate incoming incidents and automatically assign them to SREs for faster processing and more efficient support. Overall, the team has helped improve the reliability of the app through automation, proactive problem solving and a faster, more robust monitoring system.
Both the firm’s internal team and clients benefit from the improved production support. While the tax platform started as an internal application, it has since been rolled out to clients with plans to market and expand the offering in the future. Softensity’s team works closely with numerous developers that are responsible for various modules within the app, some of whom are also on Softensity’s team, and will continue to provide production and user support as the application grows and evolves.
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