Overview

Deluxe embarked on a transformative initiative to enhance developer efficiency, automate processes, and standardize its CI/CD workflows. The company also sought centralized visibility and governance across its software delivery lifecycle, aligning technology modernization with business goals to deliver reliable and high-quality products.

Goals

1. Improve Developer Efficiency: Reduce manual toil and increase automation.‍
2. Standardize CI/CD Processes: Create reusable templates for consistent workflows.
3. Enforce policies and ensure visibility across teams.
   

Enhance Developer Experience (DevEx): Deliver a streamlined experience to boost productivity and ensure quality outcomes for end customers.

Challenges Before Harness

Deluxe faced several obstacles that hindered its ability to deliver efficiently:

• Fragmented Tooling: Teams relied on disparate tools and custom scripts, complicating pipeline management.
  
• Manual Toil: Developers spent excessive time writing and maintaining scripts for pipelines manually.
• No unified platform existed to enforce consistent policies or security standards across teams.
  

“There were a lot of custom scripts written, multiple tools used, and no centralized governance in place. There was no single authority validating standards like security scans or ensuring consistency across pipelines.”

• Pankaj Gupta, Executive Director, Enterprise Architecture at Deluxe

Why Deluxe Chose Harness

Harness provided solutions that aligned perfectly with Deluxe’s vision:

1. Unified Platform: A centralized system for managing CI/CD pipelines and enforcing governance.
   
2. Enhanced Developer Experience: Simplified pipeline creation and management resonated with Deluxe’s focus on improving DevEx.
   
3. Comprehensive SDLC Support: Harness’s platform-centric approach matched Deluxe’s vision for end-to-end lifecycle impact.
   

“We needed a product that would help us at every stage of the SDLC. Harness’s platform-centric approach coincided with our vision at Deluxe.”

• Satish Balasubramanian, Vice President - Head of Architecture & Shared Services at Deluxe

Results After Implementing Harness

Harness delivered significant improvements across Deluxe’s software delivery lifecycle:

Developer Efficiency

• Pipelines can now be set up in under 30 minutes using reusable templates. Earlier, this used to take 2 weeks.
  
• Automation reduced manual scripting efforts, enabling developers to focus on innovation. This manual project and service creation to an automated workflow with Harness showed 3 months of developer effort saved across three projects.
  

Enhanced Security

• Security Test Orchestration (STO) ensures vulnerabilities are flagged early in the pipeline, preventing builds from proceeding without addressing critical issues.
  
• Centralized policies enforce compliance consistently across teams.
  

Vikas Mehta, Enterprise Architect Principal at Deluxe, emphasized this impact: “For every check-in, we invoke the pipeline so that security scans flag any high or critical severity issue. Our centralized policies ensure no team can bypass it.”

Improved CI/CD Reliability

• Continuous Delivery (CD) processes are automated with integrated checks for security, testing, and performance validation. This enabled 100+ deployments a month with zero or minimal errors.
  
• Deployment gates provide confidence by ensuring only validated builds proceed, while rollback plans are embedded for safety.
  

Pankaj shared his perspective on CD improvements: “With Harness CD, one of the biggest improvements is the confidence we have in deployment. Gates ensure only the right things are deployed, and rollback scripts are already embedded.”

Centralized Visibility

• All data is centralized within Harness’s dashboards, providing unified insights into CI/CD performance metrics and efficiency.
  

Business Impact

Harness empowered Deluxe to achieve:

1. Significant Reduction in Developer Toil & Improved Productivity: Automation freed developers from maintenance tasks. Standardized workflows enhanced satisfaction and efficiency.
   
2. Stronger Security Compliance: Early vulnerability detection reduced risks enterprise-wide.
   
3. Unified Visibility & Governance: Centralized data enabled consistent enforcement of policies.
   

Harness provided Deluxe with a scalable, secure, and streamlined CI/CD process that transformed developer efficiency and empowered teams to focus on innovation rather than maintenance tasks.