Learn how nvisia leverages platform engineering teams and approaches to accelerate cloud adoption with automation, while enhancing cybersecurity with zero trust architecture.
This is an nvisia knowledge base article.
In the realm of platform engineering and cloud-native transformation, nvisia's approach, as detailed in our post on Digital Foundations and Team Topologies concepts, presents a compelling blueprint for organizations aiming to accelerate their cloud adoption, automate their operations, and enhance cybersecurity with zero-trust architecture.
The platform engineering team is a strategic approach used by nvisia to accelerate safe cloud adoption through automation to improve cybersecurity with zero trust architectural features. This concept involves the formation of a specialized platform team that is responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the underlying platform infrastructure required for hybrid cloud applications.
This article explores how we leverage the platform engineering team concept to drive cloud adoption through automation and improve cybersecurity with zero-trust architectural features.
In late 2023, Gartner ranked platform engineering (teams) as a top 10 strategic technology trend for 2024. But platform engineering has been gaining steam for many years. In a nutshell, the platform engineering team may be best understood through its focus, goals, and delivery components:
Focus: A platform engineering team is a specialized team within an organization that focuses on building and maintaining an internal developer platform. In close collaboration with developers, the platform engineering team collaborates, facilitates, and eventually provides self-service platforms for delivery teams.
Goal: To limit hand-offs that slow down software release cycles, while managing the cognitive load of development teams, helping to minimize burnout and turnover. Through collaboration with delivery teams, the platform itself evolves to provide developers with self-service tools and streamlined processes, improving their speed and efficiency.
Components: Typically, a platform delivers things like:
Standardized, secure and compliant infrastructure and environments based on the team's tech stack. (We suggest leveraging the Cloud Adoption Framework's landing zone pattern, where each standard tech stack is represented with its preconfigured and hardened landing zone architype.)
Deployment pipelines for releasing cloud infrastructure, as well as software release pipelines.
Integrated security and compliance policy, both as code and managed through pipeline automation.
Observability for monitoring infrastructure, application health, security and compliance policies.
In this way, the platform engineering team creates a robust and scalable platform that enables seamless deployment and management of cloud services. They work closely with development teams to understand their requirements and provide the necessary infrastructure components, such as networking, storage, and compute resources, to support the applications.
Cloud adoption is thereby accelerated through automation, while ensuring the highest level of security and compliance are implemented as policies, maintained and monitored.
Automation plays a crucial role in nvisia's strategy, aiming to "automate everything" as a core DevOps principle. Put simply, this makes things easier for developers, reducing the toil and cognitive load that contribute to burnout and allowing for seamless application and infrastructure deployments, which are crucial for adopting cloud-native practices​​. It also frees development teams up to focus more on application development and innovation, rather than spending time on infrastructure setup and management.
For these reasons, automation is a key aspect (and benefit) of the platform engineering team concept. By supporting the rapid provisioning of resources - such as virtual machines, storage, and networking, which are essential for running cloud-based applications - it eliminates the need for manual intervention and streamlines the entire deployment process. In many ways, automation supports the other aspects of platform engineering, like standardization, scalability, reliability, security and compliance, observability and monitoring, and, of course, the developer experience and collaboration.
Without automation as the backbone, many of these concepts become little more than buzzwords
Overall, automation plays a crucial role in accelerating cloud adoption and enabling organizations to leverage the full potential of cloud-based technologies, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency.
We mentioned security as one of the key elements of the platform engineering team concept and its interrelationship to automation. We've written elsewhere about Zero Trust Architecture, and how it's supported by our platform engineering-based solution, Digital Foundations. The gist is that Zero Trust is a security model that assumes no trust in any user or device, both internal and external to the network. It requires every request for access to resources to be authenticated and authorized, regardless of the user's location or device.
This model ensures that only authorized users and devices can access the cloud infrastructure and applications, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and other cyber threats.
The important thing about this in the platform engineering context is not simply that a strengthened security posture good for your cloud infrastructure. That much is obvious. Yes, you'll want security controls like multi-factor authentication, encryption, and network segmentation, all of which enforce Zero Trust principles.
The twist is linking the acceleration and flexibility provided by automation to enhanced cybersecurity by way of a standardized Infrastructure as Code (IaC) model, i.e., Digital Foundations.
To put it another, possibly less cryptic way, if you're looking to build a secure, scalable, and production-ready cloud infrastructure, you're going to want (and need) a solid base for your infrastructure management and operations to stand on. You might even call that a foundation, perhaps even a... dare we say... digital one.
Cheekiness aside, the point is that achieving accelerated cloud adoption, automated operations, and enhanced cybersecurity can in fact be a singular endeavor, and the fundamental elements of the platform engineering team model - the focus, goals, and delivery components we mentioned earlier - insist that it should. You're not going to get that without a combination of IaC with cloud native DevSecOps best practices (which is why we cooked up Digital Foundations).
This is a knowledge base article, though, so let's stick to education and set Digital Foundations itself aside for a moment. It's the principles behind and within it that are most important here as we think about what's necessary for the establishment and optimization of a platform engineering team.
What are those principles?
To sum it all up, this is how (and why) we recommend platform engineering teams be leveraged to accelerate cloud adoption with automation, while enhancing cybersecurity. If you want to optimize your DevOps processes and release software like a boss, with code flowing freely through your secure pipeline, a cloud-native platform engineering approach with a standardized IaC model that supports automation and Zero Trust Architecture is the way to go.
If you have questions about what any of this means or would like to talk through how it might apply to your particular business and tech needs, we're always ready to chat.