HR & Payroll SaaS Startup

When we first engaged with this team, they had a working product with real paying customers — but their infrastructure was held together with manual processes and tribal knowledge. Every release required a senior engineer to SSH into production servers, run scripts in a specific order, and pray nothing broke. There was no rollback mechanism. If something went wrong, the only option was to SSH back in and manually revert changes — a process that could take hours.

Their AWS environment had grown organically over two years with no tagging strategy, no budgets, and no cost visibility. Resources were left running from old experiments. Dev environments were provisioned manually and never cleaned up. Their monthly cloud bill had grown by 60% over 12 months, but no one could explain where the money was going.

Monitoring was in place — sort of. They had CloudWatch alarms configured, but the thresholds were set arbitrarily and fired constantly. Engineers had learned to ignore alerts because 80% of them were noise. The 20% that mattered were lost in the flood. Two genuine production incidents in the previous quarter had gone undetected for over an hour because of this.

With a pipeline of enterprise prospects requiring SOC 2-aligned practices and a growing customer base expecting 99.9% uptime, the status quo was no longer viable. They needed to professionalise fast — without disrupting existing customers or derailing their product roadmap.