🏗️ Setup and Problems Link to heading

Setup Link to heading

Customer Landscape:

• Initially ~200 Windows servers, later scaled to over 1,000 across development, test, and production as new services were added and integrated into our automation
• Primarily Windows-based infrastructure: IIS, MSMQ, MSSQL, and some JBoss
• AD integrated authentication via NTLM and Kerberos, sometimes Basic Auth, host backend integration via IBM MQ
• Business-critical data processed via mainframe interfaces
• Different teams have control over:
  • Active Directory: DNS / Users / Groups
  • Firewall and Security Infrastructure
  • Reverse Proxies
  • Virtualization platform
  • PKI
• Internal traffic often unencrypted due to lack of automated PKI or cert lifecycle

Problems Link to heading

Initial Challenges:

• Pressure to deliver quick fixes prevented proper long-term planning
• Lack of automation made reproducibility and testing inconsistent
• No correlation between business errors and underlying system behavior
• Severe performance issues without clear root cause
• Buggy software with difficult traceability
• Frequent outages and unstable deployments
• No real observability or telemetry

This set the stage for the transformation journey to begin — and for us to gather the data we needed to gain control.