Customer Challenge

Fannie Mae grappled with a legacy infrastructure that was a fragmented collection of disparate systems and technologies, severely impeding collaboration, agility, and scalability. Their operations were further hampered by manual processes for deployment, configuration, and releases, creating bottlenecks, delays, and a heightened risk of errors, which ultimately affected their time to market and customer satisfaction. Moreover, ensuring compliance and security with stringent regulatory standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX, while simultaneously safeguarding data privacy, presented substantial challenges and risks. Finally, the inherent volatility in demand for mortgage services meant Fannie Mae constantly struggled with scalability, finding it difficult to efficiently expand their infrastructure to meet growing business needs while upholding performance and reliability.

Navitas Solution

In collaboration with Navitas, Fannie Mae implemented a robust DevOps solution designed to meet their unique needs. This comprehensive solution focused on several key objectives: Automated Infrastructure Deployment was achieved by codifying infrastructure as code (IaC) using AWS CloudFormation, enabling automated provisioning and management of AWS resources. For Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD), Urban Code (UCD) was employed to automate the CI/CD pipeline, streamlining the integration, testing, and deployment of application code across all environments. Urban Code (UCD) also facilitated Automated Deployment of application updates to staging and production, significantly reducing manual intervention and deployment errors. To bolster Security and Compliance, AWS IAM was configured to enforce least privilege access, ensuring secure access to AWS resources and adherence to regulatory standards. Monitoring and Logging capabilities were enhanced with Amazon CloudWatch, providing real-time insights into system performance, application behavior, and security events. Finally, Managed Database Services were established using Amazon RDS to host the mortgage database, offering a managed solution with built-in scalability, reliability, and security features.

Results

By partnering with Navitas to implement a robust DevOps solution, Fannie Mae successfully transitioned from a fragmented, manual, and risk-prone environment to a streamlined, automated, and secure infrastructure. The tangible impacts are evident across all critical areas. The adoption of automated infrastructure deployment and CI/CD pipelines significantly reduced deployment bottlenecks, leading to a 30% improvement in time to market for new features and updates. Manual errors, a persistent challenge, were drastically cut by over 75% through automated deployments, leading to a more reliable and consistent environment.

Furthermore, the enhanced security and compliance measures, fortified by AWS IAM and continuous monitoring with CloudWatch, mitigated risks and ensured adherence to stringent regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX, resulting in zero major compliance violations since implementation. Finally, leveraging managed database services and codified infrastructure enabled Fannie Mae to efficiently scale its operations, demonstrating a 40% increase in infrastructure provisioning speed and seamlessly meeting fluctuating demand for mortgage services while maintaining high performance and reliability. This transformation has empowered Fannie Mae with the agility and resilience necessary to thrive in a dynamic market and better serve its customers.