Enterprise Platform Engineering (DevOps & CI/CD Automation)

Informa is a global leader in specialist information, academic publishing, digital intelligence, and subscription-based research services. Its portfolio of customer-facing digital products supports professionals, enterprises, researchers, and decision-makers across industries including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, finance, maritime, and technology.

These applications form an essential part of Informa’s digital business, delivering premium research content and enabling thousands of organizations worldwide to access trusted market intelligence. Given the critical nature of these platforms, maintaining a secure, stable, and modern technology landscape is fundamental to protecting customer data, ensuring business continuity, and supporting ongoing innovation.

As digital platforms evolve over many years, maintaining technology currency becomes increasingly challenging. Software frameworks, third-party libraries, and development tools eventually reach the end of their supported lifecycle, introducing security risks and limiting an organization’s ability to adopt newer technologies.

Recognizing the importance of proactive modernization, Informa partnered with YenDigital to strengthen the security and long-term sustainability of its enterprise applications.

• Different application technologies required different build, packaging and deployment mechanisms.
• Applications had to be promoted across DEV, QA, PERF, UAT and PROD with environment-specific configuration and controls.
• Separate AWS account boundaries for non-production and production increased the need for controlled access and deployment governance.
• Repetitive deployment and operational tasks created opportunities for automation and standardization.
• Sitecore CMS required Windows-based tooling and MSDeploy, while Linux workloads could use AWS CodeDeploy.
• Production support required coordinated troubleshooting across application, infrastructure, network, IAM and deployment layers.
• Security, vulnerability remediation, monitoring and operational resilience needed to be embedded into the DevOps operating model.

Before the Transformation

The key issue was not simply that everything was manual; rather, delivery and operations were fragmented across technologies, environments and teams. The transformation therefore focused on standardization, automation, governance and operational visibility.

The transformation established a centralized DevOps orchestration layer with technology-specific deployment paths. Jenkins became the central automation and release orchestration platform, while AWS services and Windows tooling were used according to workload requirements.

CI/CD & Release Automation

A centralized Jenkins platform manages application build and deployment pipelines across the application portfolio. Standard stages include source checkout, dependency installation, build, testing, packaging, artifact creation, environment selection, deployment and post-deployment validation.

For .NET and Node.js applications deployed on Linux EC2, Jenkins performs the build and packaging activities and invokes AWS CodeDeploy for controlled deployment to target EC2 instances or Auto Scaling environments. This separates CI orchestration from deployment lifecycle management.

• Source checkout and dependency installation
• Build and unit-test execution
• Artifact/package creation
• AWS CodeDeploy deployment
• Deployment lifecycle monitoring
• Post-deployment validation

MuleSoft applications are integrated into Jenkins using Maven-based build and packaging workflows followed by the appropriate MuleSoft deployment mechanism. React applications use Jenkins and NPM to produce the frontend build artifact and automate the subsequent deployment process.

The operating model supports controlled application promotion across PRF, DEV, QA, UAT and PROD. Separate AWS accounts are maintained for non-production and production workloads, providing an additional security and governance boundary.

• Environment-specific configuration and deployment controls
• Controlled production access
• Release traceability
• Promotion of validated application artifacts
• Separation of non-production and production operational responsibilities

The DevOps scope extends beyond pipelines into day-to-day AWS cloud operations.

• Provisioning and configuration of application infrastructure.
• Security group and network access management.
• IAM role and policy configuration.
• Load balancer and Auto Scaling configuration.
• Application and environment-specific configuration management.
• DNS, S3, CloudFront, API Gateway and Lambda configuration.
• Increasing use of infrastructure automation and repeatable operational scripts where applicable.

Security is treated as a continuous operational responsibility rather than a one-time project activity.

The DevOps team provides operational visibility across infrastructure, applications and deployments using CloudWatch and application-specific logging.

• EC2 health and resource utilization
• Lambda execution and errors
• API Gateway activity and errors
• Load balancer target health
• Application and deployment logs
• CloudWatch metrics, alarms and events
• Post-deployment monitoring and validation

Production and non-production incidents are handled through a structured operational lifecycle:

Detect → Analyze → Investigate → Remediate → Validate → Root Cause Analysis → Prevent Recurrence

• Application and infrastructure log investigation
• IAM and permission troubleshooting
• Network and connectivity analysis
• Deployment failure investigation
• AWS service troubleshooting
• Root cause analysis and preventive improvements

• Release preparation and deployment planning
• Build/version traceability
• Environment promotion
• Production deployment controls
• Deployment validation
• Rollback support where applicable
• Post-release monitoring
• Change implementation and verification

The DevOps team operates as an extension of the client’s engineering organization and provides ongoing support across the application and cloud lifecycle.

• Standardized delivery and operational practices across approximately 50 applications.
• Automated build and deployment processes across multiple technology stacks.
• Improved repeatability and traceability of application releases.
• Reduced dependency on manual and application-specific deployment procedures.
• Established a common operating model across PRF, DEV, QA, UAT and PROD.
• Improved separation and governance between non-production and production AWS accounts.
• Integrated security, vulnerability remediation and cloud-hardening activities into DevOps operations.
• Improved monitoring and troubleshooting through centralized operational visibility.
• Created a scalable model for onboarding additional applications and AWS workloads.
• Established continuous improvement as part of BAU DevOps operations.

For a final client presentation or published case study, actual baseline and post-transformation measurements should be inserted where available.

The engagement extends beyond Jenkins administration or CI/CD implementation. The team acts as an end-to-end AWS DevOps partner across:

• Cloud engineering and AWS infrastructure operations
• CI/CD engineering and release automation
• Security and vulnerability remediation
• Monitoring and observability
• Incident and problem management
• Environment and release management
• Application operations and troubleshooting
• Operational automation
• Performance, reliability and cost optimization
• Continuous improvement and platform modernization