Case Study : Platform Engineering Empowers SMEs

🚀 Case Study

How Platform Engineering Empowers SMEs to Accelerate Growth

Meet AcmeCommerce (not real name), a thriving e-commerce business operating across the Nordics, generating €15 million annually, growing steadily for five years. With over 150 employees, their engineering organization had grown significantly in recent years—quickly enough to introduce common SME challenges!

As many SMEs first realize something’s wrong when software release timelines slip repeatedly, and developers complain repeatedly about slow, complicated processes. Executives often notice rising IT support tickets, fluctuating service availability, Ballooning Cloud Cost bills, and decreased developer productivity. These symptoms—sluggish velocity, inconsistent system performance, escalating expenses, and growing frustration among teams—typically signal deeper underlying issues, including fragmented infrastructure, lack of automation, inconsistent tools and processes, and complexity creeping into previously efficient operational workflows.

Pinpointing the Common Challenges

Fragmented Infrastructure

Cloud environments and tooling proliferated without clear standardization, leading to operational complexity and technical debt.

Unsustainable Cloud Spend

Cloud costs inflated by 40%+ year-over-year due to inefficient resource utilization, unclear visibility, and absence of cost optimization.

Limited In-House Platform/DevOps Skills

Small internal team struggling to maintain, scale, and secure rapidly growing digital operations.

Slower Delivery Timelines

Frequent releases took weeks rather than days, significantly affecting agility, innovation, and overall competitiveness.

🎯 Strategic Goals

What SMEs Aim to Accomplish with Platform Engineering

Achieve measurable reduction in cloud spendign

Simplify infrastructure management

Implement secure and efficient delivery workflows

Enhance reliability, availability, and overall user satisfaction

⚙️ Applied Solutions: Addressing SME Challenges with Platform Engineering Best Practices

Below, we clearly map each common platform challenge encountered by SMEs to recommended platform engineering practices, linked directly to our productized offerings. See precisely how our specialized services help SMEs overcome their technical obstacles, enabling measurable business growth and agility:

🔸 Challenge #1: Fragmented Infrastructure & Operational Complexity

Problem:
Infrastructure sprawl, lack of standardization and automation, diverse tooling, and manual configuration management lead to complexity, technical debt, slower issue remediation times, and frequent reliability incidents.

Our Recommended Solution: 🛠️ Platform Foundation

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

We establish declarative and reproducible infrastructure using industry-leading tools like Terraform, fluxCD, and Helm charts to provision standardized and automated environments.

Managed Kubernetes Setup

A secure, scalable Kubernetes platform centrally administered—allowing your developers to deploy workloads consistently across staging, QA and production environments.

Standardized CI/CD Pipelines

Implementation of robust CI/CD tooling such as GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or GitLab pipelines enables streamlined, repeatable deployment processes, reducing manual overhead and complexity.

Integrated Security and Compliance Controls

By embedding foundational security practices such as container scanning, vulnerability management, and workload isolation directly into the pipeline, we significantly improve your organization’s security posture and compliance capability.

Developer Platform Portal & Documentation

With our newly introduced Developer Portal service, we establish centralized documentation, ready-to-use templates, and self-service infrastructure resources, enabling developers to independently access resources—simplifying day-to-day tasks and reducing platform team dependencies.

🔸 Challenge #2: Rising Cloud Costs and Resource Inefficiencies

Problem:
Unchecked proliferation of cloud services, inefficiencies, and poor visibility into usage patterns lead to escalating cloud bills, making IT spend unpredictable and challenging for budgeting purposes.

Our Recommended Solution: ☁️ Cloud Cost Optimization Sprint

Comprehensive Cloud Cost Assessment

A full cloud-spend audit clarifies where your money actually goes, identifying unused resources, overspending patterns, suboptimal workload setups, and areas ripe for immediate cost-saving interventions.

Actionable Optimization Recommendations

We propose clear actions for resizing or removing idle resources, optimizing cloud workload placement, adopting cost-conscious practices like spot instances, reserved capacity planning, and leveraging auto-scaling solutions efficiently.

Cloud Cost Efficiency Training

Through targeted workshops, we educate your engineering and product teams on how to adopt practices for continuously controlling and monitoring cloud spend—creating lasting organizational discipline around cloud cost optimization.

🔸 Challenge #3: Missing or Limited Platform & DevOps Engineering Expertise

Problem:
SMEs frequently face gaps in specialized DevOps and platform engineering skills. Internal teams struggle to independently create and maintain platforms, delaying product development and slowing business agility.

Our Recommended Solution: 🎓 Platform Engineering Skill Boost

Customized Skills Gap Analysis

We objectively analyze your team’s current capabilities, identifying specific gaps relative to your infrastructure and business objectives

Tailored Education & Practical Enablement

Using bespoke, hands-on training adapted precisely to your infrastructure and technology stack, we immediately elevate your team’s real-world DevOps and platform engineering competence.

Practical Learning via Active Implementation

Rather than abstract learning, your team applies their training directly on relevant use-cases, accelerating learning pace, retention, and immediately increasing your internal team capacity.

🔸 Challenge #4: Slow Software Delivery & Long Release Cycles

Problem:
Manual deployments, slow builds, inconsistent testing workflows, and siloed teams lead to prolonged software-release cycles. This hampers innovation, competitiveness and negatively impacts customer retention.

Our Recommended Solution: 🚀 Developer Portal (Self-Service)

Self-Service Deployment & Environments

With an internal Developer Portal, your engineers effortlessly provision environments on-demand, reducing dependency on limited Ops and DevOps resources, thereby dramatically accelerating delivery timelines.

Centralized Developer Experience

Unified gateway providing direct access to prebuilt infrastructure, reusable CI/CD pipeline templates, service catalogs, and clear operational guidelines—enabling rapid software iteration and fast, safe releases.

Enhanced Internal Communication & Collaboration

Break down silos across your organization by clearly documented away barriers to deployment, improving developer experience, cooperation, and transparency across all product and platform teams.

🔸 Challenge #5: Security, Reliability & Compliance Risks

Problem:
Inconsistent security practices, missing automation, and fragmented compliance management increase security risks, reduce overall reliability, and compromise regulatory compliance readiness.

Our Recommended Solution: ✅ Platform Health Check & Optimization

Infrastructure, Security & Reliability Audit

We perform an extensive health check of your existing systems and processes, pinpointing high-risk areas, potential security gaps, compliance violations, and reliability bottlenecks.

Rapid Remediation & Quick-Wins Implementation

Once challenges are prioritized clearly, immediate quick-win improvements are implemented—patching vulnerabilities, standardizing security practices, and increasing reliability across your infrastructure.

Roadmap for Long-Term Excellence

BTo ensure continued security, compliance, and optimal reliability, we provide you with clear, actionable recommendations designed specifically around your team’s capacity and existing architecture, accompanied by training workshops to empower long term self-reliance.

📊 Measured Results: What SMEs Typically Experience

Based on reputable industry surveys (e.g. CNCF, Gartner, State of DevOps Report) and publicly available statistics from similar SMEs, implementing expert-driven platform engineering practices typically result in tangible improvements such as:

Colleagues discussing data and strategy in an office meeting.

🚀 Decreased Cloud Costs

SMEs implementing formal cloud optimization projects commonly achieve 20%–40% cost reductions within 6–12 months.
(Source: Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report)

🔧 Infrastructure Efficiency & Stability

Platform standardization and automation decrease infrastructure-related incidents by typically 30–50%.
(Source: Puppet State of DevOps Report 2023)

⏩ Improved Delivery Velocity

Proper CI/CD workflows generally provide SMEs potential increases in deployment frequency of up to 40–60%, significantly boosting agility and innovation capability.
(Source: DORA State of DevOps Report)

🎓 Empowered Internal Teams

SMEs strategically prioritizing engineering team enablement show statistically significant improvement in internal knowledge, resulting in more empowered, engaged and productive employees.
(Source: Gartner Technical Skills Benchmark 2023)

enterprise grade service for SMEs

🤝 Why Choose Us: Your Experts in Platform Engineering

At Platform Engr, we specialize in supporting SMEs. Our packaged, productized offerings—such as our Platform Foundation, Platform Health Check & Optimization, and Platform Engineering Skill Boost—are specifically designed around SMEs’ tight resource constraints and rapid-growth ambitions.

With clearly defined scope, timeline, and deliverables, you gain immediate clarity, transparency, and predictable investment results. Our goal is simple: deliver enterprise-grade platform engineering outcomes scaled effectively to SME budget and needs.

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