mib Management Institute Bochum

01. challenges

Before the collaboration began, mib Management Institut Bochum GmbH was faced with a number of technical and structural challenges that made the growth of its SaaS application Copiki increasingly difficult. This phase was characterized by constant growth: more and more customers were added – and with them new requirements for scalability and infrastructure.

“However, our existing infrastructure could barely keep up with this pace. Our fragmented system landscape consisted of several large VPS instances, each running different customer systems. This led to high maintenance costs and little automation,” says Andre Plöger, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at mib Management Institut Bochum GmbH and responsible for the overall technical architecture. Updates had to be installed individually for each instance, backups had to be checked manually and inhomogeneous versions increasingly resulted in technical legacy issues. In addition, there was no central overview of running instances, resources or costs, which made management even more difficult. Although the customer data was stored securely in a German data center, the source code of the application itself was stored in a repository outside the EU, which did not meet the desired data protection requirements.

“It was particularly critical that our internal IT resources were increasingly occupied with system maintenance – valuable capacities that should actually be used for the further development and expansion of Copiki. The technical infrastructure was therefore increasingly becoming a bottleneck for innovation and growth.”

02. solutions

“The decision to choose NETWAYS Web Services as our partner has proved to be the right one for us: From the very first meeting, we got to know a team that not only has a deep technical understanding, but is also honestly interested in our challenges,” says Andre Plöger. During the initial contact, //mib received concrete and realistic solution proposals from the existing portfolio, which was tailored to the situation. The fact that the data would remain entirely in Germany was particularly convincing, which meant that the data protection and compliance requirements could be met in full.

The service offering from NETWAYS Web Service – consisting of Managed Kubernetes, a self-hosted GitLab instance for the application and infrastructure repositories and the accompanying support from the personal MyEngineer® – quickly proved to be the optimal solution for the desired requirements.

Thanks to the robust and highly available Kubernetes infrastructure, the application can not only be provided more reliably and stably, but can also be scaled much more easily. The previously very complex and error-prone maintenance of the infrastructure stacks was completely taken over, which immediately led to a noticeable reduction in the workload of the internal IT team at //mibs. “The time and energy gained is now flowing into the further development of Copiki – exactly where our real added value is created.”

The advantages at a glance:

• A greatly simplified and accelerated deployment of new customer instances
• A centralized, automated and stable update system for all instances
• Enormous efficiency gains in infrastructure relocations thanks to close collaboration

03. success

The move of the infrastructure to the Managed Kubernetes environment was an important milestone in the development of version 4 of mib Management Institut Bochum GmbH’s SaaS application Copiki and a significant step on the way to rethinking integrated management systems.

“Thanks to the new platform, we can deliver further versions and our vision much faster and in a more structured way.” The introduction of dedicated environments for development, testing, staging and production makes it possible to test functions much better before they go live. “Our customers benefit directly from this: they receive a more stable application, faster feature releases and a more reliable user experience.”

All targets were achieved and many were even exceeded. The reliable, highly available infrastructure makes it possible to make the service level agreement (SLA) even more attractive to customers. “At the same time, the collaboration with MyEngineer® and the entire NWS team has proven to be extremely profitable. Our ideas were not only implemented, but also thought through – with an understanding of the big picture and the right eye for technical details,” says Plöger.

Looking to the future, the team at mib Management Institut Bochum GmbH has ambitious plans: “We are aiming to fully integrate AI into our integrated management system in order to set new standards – especially in German-speaking countries.”