Visma Reliability Champions of 2021

Last month’s fire in OVHcloud’s datacenter in Strasbourg, France, was yet another reminder that things can go wrong. That’s why Visma teams spend time planning for possible failures, whether it is natural disasters, ransomware attacks, technical failures or human error.

About 30 minutes into How Visma delivers software using DevOps, I summarize how our teams set recovery objectives, how they decide which disasters to plan for, and how teams can be confident that they will be able to deliver a reliable service despite failures.

Over the last three months, we have run an internal competition in Visma to further promote reliability engineering. We asked our teams to nominate their business continuity and disaster recovery plans. A jury narrowed down the nominees to three finalists. They are:

1) Enterprise BI - a turn-key Business Intelligence solution in the Visma Enterprise suite that integrates data from several sources and presents them in easily available dashboards and reports to support data-driven decisions.

2) Provisioning Gateway - an event-driven orchestration system that simplifies integrations across many Visma products, including Visma.net, Visma Online, Tripletex, Passeli, Severa, Fivaldi and Visma Academy.

3) InSchool - a school administration system for school staff, teachers, students and parents in the upper secondary schools in Norway

The jury liked the Enterprise BI plan because it included many different types of technical failures, and because the team has tested the disaster scenarios to verify that they are able to recover from those failures within their recovery objectives.

The jury liked the Provisioning Gateway plan because the team has tested many of their scenarios multiple times, and they have identified and acted upon several improvement actions as part of their work. 

The jury liked the InSchool plan because it includes a detailed risk analysis for a wide variety of possible disaster scenarios, including in the security and privacy area. The plan also has detailed recovery procedures and test results.

Next, we asked a large group of Service Owners, Infrastructure Engineers and Data Protection Managers to vote on the three finalists to decide who would become the Visma Reliability Champions of 2021.

The votes have been counted, and the winners are: The Provisioning Gateway team! Congratulations!

One voter commented that they had observed that the Provisioning Gateway team frequently announces robustness testing exercises, and that the team is both thorough and professional.

The jury particularly commended the Provisioning Gateway team for the serious dedication to reliability that they have shown over time.

As a prize, each member of the Provisioning Gateway team will receive the following t-shirt, designed by Fernando Quiros Sauceda.

We congratulate all the finalists, the Provisioning Gateway team in particular, and look forward to next year’s competition! Who will be the Visma Reliability Champions of 2022?