From cloud skeptic to cloud-native

Starting point and key objectives

Transfering your source codes to the public cloud? For OGiTiX, this was not an issue for a long time. The software company has been successfully developing solutions for identity and access management (IAM) for 14 years. The application infrastructures on the customer side and at OGiTiX itself were traditional “on-premises”. But the market is changing.

Market in transition, SaaS & development in the cloud, replacing legacy IT

Before the outbreak of the Corona pandemic in 2019, companies spent less than a third of their IT budgets on cloud services, according to current market figures from Gartner. By the middle of the decade, market researchers expect the cloud to become the dominant IT infrastructure in the economy for the first time. Cloud services are growing more than twice as fast as the rest of the IT market. By 2025, this difference will even quadruple, according to the Gartner analysts in their study.

For OGiTiX, the step into the data cloud makes twofold sense: The software manufacturer wants to meet the growing demand for flexible IT services and also offer its solutions as software as a service in the future. In the first step, the cloud offers advantages for a migration of the in-house development and test environments.

In recent years, the operation of over 70 virtual machines (VMs) has taken up more and more of the four-person development team’s working time. The complexity of the company’s own IT landscape made it difficult to quickly provision VMs for development projects and test scenarios. Although 50 percent of the systems are offline most of the time, the medium-sized software company had to provide and maintain the necessary hardware. Ever-increasing security requirements made it uneconomical to operate the infrastructure in-house. When the old server hardware was about to be replaced, the opportunity arose to noticeably reduce the effort and costs for the company’s own IT.

Too complex for medium-sized businesses?

But market research disappointed: The platforms of the hyper-scalers are too complex for the small team. Features that are superfluous for SMEs would tie up too much working time. Without specialists, the ongoing costs for the new IT infrastructure would remain intransparent and unpredictable. The software house would have to interpose a managed services provider specifically to make the cloud manageable.

In addition, OGiTiX attaches great importance to data sovereignty and German server locations. Many of its customers come from security-sensitive industries such as high-tech, utilities, or healthcare, including a leading German provider in the hospital sector. However, there are no effective data protection guarantees outside the EU legal area.

They were therefore looking for a public cloud to automate their own IT infrastructure, which was also easy to operate and complied with European data protection standards. The IAM specialists from North Rhine-Westphalia did not find what they were looking for in Silicon Valley, but a few kilometers up the Rhine in Cologne-Ehrenfeld at gridscale, a specialist for medium-sized businesses.

What specifically has improved for OGiTiX?

Right from the start, the user interface of the new platform made an impression: “We were used to a lot when it came to managing our virtual servers. Until then, we had been working with a Hyper-V console. When we first looked at the gridscale dashboard, we were surprised at how much tidier and more intuitive a cloud can be,” recalls Nils Hondong, co-founder and product manager at OGiTiX.

The basic installation of the systems was therefore completed quickly. Nevertheless, the developers had not expected how quickly IT resources could be provisioned. “Within minutes, we start virtual machines. In the past, preparing our own hardware and software often took hours before we could start productive work,” says Hondong.

For example, the gridscale cloud noticeably accelerated development and testing work at OGiTiX: “In our test scenarios, we simulate a wide variety of infrastructure setups: load peaks for user access, interconnection of management servers or new demo data. gridscale freed us from all the hardware and admin ballast here,” explains Hondong.

This also pays off on the cost side: Unlike in-house operation and other cloud platforms, gridscale does not charge for holding unused resources. “We keep preconfigured VMs ready. But we only have to pay when and for as long as we put them into operation. The costs for our cloud infrastructure are always transparent and comprehensible,” says Hondong.

At the same time, the software house benefits from the higher performance level of its cloud IT. Compiling new source code, a standard task, is now a third faster. “This adds up extremely in everyday life and saves us a lot of time,” reports the product manager.