ECS awarded AWS DevOps Competency

As a leading transformation consultancy, the commitment to achieving outcomes for our clients has always motivated us to attract and develop the best talent. Doing so enables our clients to gain the tools, processes and skills they need to become tomorrow’s disruptors.

Driven by this commitment, ECS has been on its own journey, and is pleased to announce that after months of rigorous vetting and validation, we have been awarded the DevOps competency partner status by AWS – one of only 12 UK headquartered businesses.

Not only are we extremely proud of the team – without whom this wouldn’t have been possible, we are equally proud of the engagements that enabled us to apply for the competency in the first place.

What’s important to AWS during these assessments is the ability to demonstrate our skills in a specialised area, as well as AWS technical expertise and proven customer success. Being able to draw on recent engagements with Intelliflo, Cancer Research and two out of the five top UK banks enabled us to tick the required boxes and showcase one of the key services we provide our clients.

Why is the AWS DevOps Competency important?

As more enterprises choose to digitally transform, many look to DevOps as an accelerator to achieving greater innovation, automated processes and collaborative engineering. But saying you do DevOps is different to achieving true synchronisation across your IT functions; and bridging the gap between those IT functions, the wider business and your customers.

This award is an independent verification of ECS’ expertise and experience in the DevOps space. It not only recognises our commitment to customer outcomes; it is an industry benchmark to say that our customers can rest assured that they will receive the consultation and advice they need to create and implement their own bespoke DevOps environment.

How does the AWS DevOps competency benefit our clients?

Whilst it’s nice to receive recognition from one of our valued partners, challenging ourselves to complete an AWS competency is always about bettering our team so we can offer greater value to our clients. This has been achieved in a number of ways:

• Outcome focused – ECS has always been an outcome-driven consultancy, and completing this competency reminded us of the importance of that. Not only is DevOps about integrating modern tools and technology, it is about understanding the client’s operations, teams, ambitions and customers. Only then can you work together to overcome challenges so they can establish long-lasting change that benefits the customer experience and overall time to market.
• DevOps certification –to achieve AWS DevOps Competency status, there is a requirement that partners have a minimum of four DevOps Professional certified engineers within the business. To become professionally certified, candidates must have a minimum of two years’ experience in DevOps and be a certified Solutions Architect. To ensure that our internal skillset more than met this requirement, ECS put nine of our team through an intense bootcamp. Not only have we been able to share this additional knowledge with the wider team, nine of our incredibly talented engineers have achieved an industry standard benchmarking – letting the world know they understand DevOps inside and out and are the right people to consult with our clients and ensure they can drive their own change programs forward successfully.
• DevOps principles sit across all our practices – Collaborative engineering that enables people, process and technology is fundamental to how we design and build solutions. This means that no matter why you engage with ECS – whether that be for digital engineering, customer experience, data and analytics or cloud adoption – our engineers embrace and encourage our clients to adopt a DevOps approach so they can achieve sustainable change long after we’re gone.
• Technical Competency in AWS Toolsets – As well as demonstrating our ability to deliver the value of DevOps principles – namely increasing collaboration between teams, automating processes & infrastructure and enabling our clients to get products to market at pace – we also demonstrated our expertise when it comes to helping clients design, architect, build, migrate, and manage their workloads and applications on AWS.

In the words of Jason Man, DevOps Practice Lead at ECS:

“I have been part of ECS for 8 years and over the years, I have had the pleasure of personally driving, mentoring and watching the DevOps arm of ECS grow in strength – and this wouldn’t have been possible without the talent, enthusiasm and determination of our team.

This recent milestone not only recognises our commitment to continually learning so we can best serve our clients, it also recognises the talent of our team who have collaboratively delivered so many great projects. The AWS DevOps competency further enhances our position as one of the top digital transformation consultancies and we’re grateful to AWS for seeing our value and endorsing the ECS DevOps capability.”