A little catch up with BigChange CEO Martin Port
When BigChange was looking for a new technology partner, a trustworthy business contact recommended Zen Internet to Martin. As with any procurement process, a few different businesses were considered and compared technically and commercially, but very quickly when Martin and his team met the Zen leadership team, the personal approach caught their attention and made it an easy decision.
After seven years of growth, BigChange was looking for a technology partner that could further inform and fuel BigChange’s continuous improvement of availability (uptime), quality of service, security, and crucially, sustain its environment in AWS as technologies, threats and best practices evolve. From the outset, Martin was clear in his mind that they were seeking out a real partnership, one that would see both teams integrate well together. A six-figure contract value, this partnership would need to be innovative, flexible and agile in order to support the business in its ambitions to become a unicorn (a privately held £1 bn start-up company).
Now a £100mn business, BigChange has ambitious growth plans with new territories and new markets in its sights. The Zen personal approach instils a great deal of confidence in Martin, who has enjoyed frank, straight talking business strategy debates with Zen founder and CEO Richard Tang.
The Techy bit
What’s important to the success of this relationship is the alignment of tactical resources to the strategic priorities of the customer. As we’ve seen from the many Well Architected Reviews we’ve conducted on AWS environments over the years, there’s little appetite for organisations to invest in aligning AWS infrastructure and processes to best practice if there’s no underlying commercial benefit to doing so.
So, the first step was to identify a workstream to prioritise and demonstrate business benefit. Together we identified a security focussed workstream which would bring together a number of tactical engineering activities and operational processes, to align to the attainment of the Cyber Essentials accreditation. As we’ve seen with other software development customers, the attainment of this accreditation is a key strategic objective for BigChange to reassure customers of secure best practices and support new business acquisition in particular sectors.
3 key project management tactics
With the working relationship now well proven, we expanded the remit of the team to look at further workstreams prioritised by strategic importance to BigChange. Work began on a database workstream to develop scripting that enables any exiting customers’ data to be automatically deleted from all databases efficiently and without impacting performance, an essential requirement under our Terms of Trade and data protection legislation. Moreover, we have provided SQL DBA expertise to BigChange’s in-house team on a £5m investment project to develop a near-real time data feed into the data lake of a new business intelligence reporting service.
As an example of the engineering work delivered, we focused on patching, which the Cyber Essentials accreditation, requires organisations to apply within 14 days of updates being released by a vendor. We selected the appropriate AWS services and developed, tested and deployed bespoke scripts to automatically apply patches incrementally to avoid disruption and yet at remarkable pace across all development, test and production accounts (more than 200 servers and containers). Initial testing was conducted in conjunction with each application’s development team to ensure there would be no impact on application performance.
