Zero downtime, 24/7 service, and quick response times is what every business wants, especially in today’s highly competitive marketplace. With heritage technologies and platforms in place, businesses often fail to handle spikes in requests, change in usage and high volume use cases that result in extended periods of downtime. To build the optimal platform for business continuity, enterprises require modern solutions that are easy to use, cost-effective, and geared toward uninterrupted data flow between enterprise systems. However, businesses often lack the skill and experience to deal with constantly evolving technologies which prevents them from adopting the modern solutions for sustaining business continuity. To keep pace with this new breed of distributed data technologies, enterprises require support from an experienced partner that can provide uninterrupted service with quick response times while ensuring zero downtime.

Leveraging decades of long experience in distributed systems and engineering, Johnny Miller and Hayato Shimizu have found the right answer to maintaining business continuity and managing this new wave of distributed data technologies through their company digitalis.io. Governed by a mission to bridge the skill and experience gap and make these technologies simple, digitalis.io works closely with its clients to manage, deploy, monitor, and upgrade systems engineered to support zero downtime and continuous data flow via their intelligent and automated, cloud-based and on-premises managed service. The company recognizes the challenges with adopting these new technologies and coaches its customers, architects and engineers on how to best leverage them. “We align ourselves with our clients, become a part of their organization, study their method of management and the cadence of their business to make it a success,” states Johnny Miller, an advocate for DevOps, Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka and co-founder of digitalis.io. With a spectrum of supported platforms, databases, and messaging systems, digitalis.io provides round-the-clock customer service through its managed IT service as well as an experienced service management team to assist clients with meeting their business objectives.

Automation to Promote Business Continuity

To support business continuity, digitalis.io’s modus operandi involves automation and proactive monitoring of all processes to avoid human error and eliminate the need for manual change. From an infrastructure perspective, digitalis.io analyzes and adapts to the budget and data volumes required by the business and facilitates this via its intelligent tooling and automation. “We provide organizations access to powerful technologies and frameworks so they can focus on developing innovative solutions to their business requirements,” explains Miller.

Being a DevOps oriented company, digitalis.io follows a healthy approach to automate, monitor, and upgrade client systems and enable efficient data-driven decision-making with the hands-on expertise to bridge the business-technology gap. “We follow a DevOps approach from the ground up by securely accessing the client’s environment, and following a tested, automated and repeatable approach to deploying and managing their systems.” The company has developed intelligent and automatically adaptive tooling that along with its extensive instrumentation and automation provides digitalis.io with control and valuable insights onto its clients’ systems. This enables them to ensure they are performing as expected and adhering to their specific requirements. Their tooling ingests thousands of metrics per server, per second, analyses it and responds automatically or alerts their engineers to rapidly mitigate any issue in the system before it becomes service impacting. Additionally, digitalis.io has considerable expertise in a variety of infrastructures- on-premises and all major cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

digitalis.io’s onboarding process begins with an initial assessment phase to analyze the customer’s requirements. This process includes scoping the services required, capturing high-level functional and non-functional requirements, along with an assessment of the client’s infrastructure, budget and internal processes. Based on this information, digitalis.io works with the client to determine the optimal deployment and delivery of the services to be managed. Once the services are identified, digitalis.io works with its client to implement and integrate the required systems by leveraging and adapting its standard designs, processes, automation and tooling. The experienced engineers at digitalis.io will then securely access the client’s platform and begin its managed service. Throughout this process and on a regular basis the company is regularly communicating with its customer on their future plans to ensure the success and sustainability of the platform.
As a crucial element of digitalis.io’s managed services, the company employs proactive monitoring and automatic adaptive management of the client’s platform. digitalis.io collects the required metrics, events and logs from the managed platform and presents it through dashboards to visualize trends, detect anomalies and react accordingly—both automatically or via an engineer. digitalis.io produces regular reports which summarize platform activities such as capacity predictions, system resource utilization, and any issues that require attention. Based on the client’s requirements, digitalis.io also performs backups and restores of the systems it manages which can also be customized as needed.

The company integrates with its clients existing enterprise tooling, processes and practices such as security policies, monitoring, and alerting and auditing. digitalis.io provides a fully managed services for numerous distributed data technologies such as Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise, Elassandra, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka and Confluent Enterprise.
Creating a Footprint in Managed Services

Interestingly, digitalis.io has been in existence for just under three years, yet it has made a mark in the managed services market owing to its founders and team who have strong expertise and a rich background in software engineering, DevOps and distributed systems. As an experienced software engineer, DevOps engineer and architect, Miller has worked with an array of customers from small startups to large enterprises. With a deep understanding of industry and organizational challenges, he has helped clients move to secure, agile, always on and highly available platforms. As passionate leaders, Miller and Shimizu have always believed in making a difference to customers by focusing on distributed data technologies and helping their customers adopt them. This ethos has attracted numerous customers to digitalis.io from startups to established enterprises across different verticals such as banking, financial services, healthcare and advertising.

"We align ourselves with our clients, become a part of their organization, study their method of management and the cadence of their business to make it a success"

digitalis.io’s prowess in the managed IT services space can be best explained through a case study that involved one of its clients, Vero, a social network. The company assisted the client with the deployment and day-to-day management of DataStax Enterprise—a distributed cloud database built on Apache Cassandra—and the management and migration of their platform onto Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Vero was in search of the right people, technology and platform along with the best way of leveraging their infrastructure,” adds Miller. digitalis. io worked in close partnership with Vero’s development team to understand their business requirements and their customer expectations, while keeping their systems running round the clock. With data accuracy and security in mind, digitalis.io ensured the multiple systems were architected, deployed and migrated onto AWS with zero downtime while complying with Vero’s expectations for future growth.

With multiple success stories, digitalis.io is expanding its customer base beyond Europe. Their advancements in automation, instrumentation along with their ongoing development of adaptive and intelligent tooling delivers a compelling and simple solution to a complicated problem. “Our goal is to make the adoption, deployment and performance of complex distributed data systems easy for our customers so they can focus on building great services for their customers,” says Miller.