All case studies / Diligent
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Diligent reduced deployment time from 2 weekends to 2 hours with Octopus
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About Diligent
Diligent provides governance, risk, compliance, audit, and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) software to companies worldwide. Over one million users and more than 700,000 board members and leaders rely on Diligent software to lead purposefully and drive greater impact.
One of Diligent’s solutions is entity and subsidiary management software. It helps companies operating in multiple countries to record and maintain their entity structure and governance.
Diligent also offers board management software. This solution provides an integrated platform for insights and collaboration in a central location.
Challenges
Diligent needed to modernize its complex deployments across data centers
Before using Octopus, Diligent ran manual scripts to deploy its software products. The team primarily ran their applications on Windows servers and wanted a tool to automate their deployments.
Diligent was deploying software to multiple data centers for its different sites. A typical deployment took 4 days across 2 weekends, with 3 to 4 engineers running scripts.
The manual process also resulted in:
- Minor inconsistencies and delays
- Challenges with root cause analysis
- Risks with the limited talent to run scripts
- Reliance on backup plans to resolve issues around the clock
Solution
Automated, repeatable, auditable deployments at enterprise scale
Diligent has been using Octopus Deploy since 2020 to automate and simplify its deployments. Using Octopus’s Tenants feature, the team only need to define one deployment process to use across their databases. Tenants also provide the team flexibility to manage each deployment’s unique requirements, using tenant tags to group servers with similar configurations.
Octopus also helps Diligent ensure its deployments are repeatable. Anyone on the team can easily replicate processes. If someone wants to duplicate a deployment for a new customer site, they have a record. Since introducing Octopus to production, they can release to all 10 data centers in 2 to 3 hours with one engineer. The team have rapidly expanded their feature set with multiple new components going live after deployment with Octopus.
Diligent also manages its secrets and variables through Octopus to ensure correct and consistent configuration across deployments.
Octopus has supported Diligent as it’s scaled, making deployments auditable and reliable.
Octopus has helped us change our mindset from let’s just get stuff done to let’s get things automated and repeatable. If anyone needs to duplicate a deployment, they can do it easily.
Diligent's CI/CD pipeline
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Value
Modernizing complex deployments
Diligent went from manual to automated deployments using Octopus. The team have since scaled beyond their Windows deployments. Octopus now supports Diligent as it modernizes towards a microservices architecture and deploys to various targets, including Kubernetes clusters. This lets the team modernize at a pace that suits the organization.
Using tenants lets our team much more easily target our deployments. Using variables and tenant tags gives us the flexibility to configure those deployments in a way that works for us, and also gives us a great overview of our deployments at a glance.
Reduced deployment complexity
Octopus has simplified Diligent’s complex deployments and provided the visibility the team needed to scale. Having a single-pane view of deployments means anyone can see key information at a glance. Using Octopus’s Tenants feature has also delivered consistent deployments across Diligent’s customer sites. The team define just one deployment process that they customize to meet the unique needs of each site.
Before Octopus, we had limited visibility of our deployments. Now, we have a single-pane view of all our deployments and tenants in one place across all our environments. It has really helped us to cross the boundary between non-production and production within our organization.
Repeatability for consistent deployments
Having all deployment processes recorded in Octopus means the team can repeat any deployment in the future. This delivers substantial time savings with less frequent maintenance tasks and repeatable processes they can run anytime. Plus, anyone on the team can run a deployment, reducing the risk of relying on a handful of team members.
Increased deployment frequency
Using Octopus has helped Diligent deploy more frequently across its customer sites. The team have gone from deploying one monolithic update per quarter to deploying smaller updates more frequently. Upgrades are now easier and quicker to deploy, providing enhanced service and greater value to their customers.
Since having Octopus, we’ve been able to break out some of our services using tenants, and this means that we can deploy more frequently and easily. We’ve gone from a single, monolithic deployment per quarter to more ad hoc deployments, which means more frequent upgrades for customers.
Improved security, auditing, and compliance
Having a record of every deployment has provided Diligent with a better audit trail to improve its compliance and auditability. The team use variables in Octopus to store secrets and certificates, improving security and compliance. They’re also implementing the ServiceNow Integration to automate ServiceNow tickets through Octopus. This simplifies audit requirements when preparing for a new release.