Case Study CI/CD and Managed Services for a Benefits Solutions Leader
How we modernized legacy systems, established CI/CD workflows, and achieved 100% SLA adherence and near-100% uptime for a benefits solutions leader.
100%
SLA adherence
Near-100%
System uptime
Zero
Missed or untracked production signals
The Client
A leading provider of health, wellness, and lifestyle benefits solutions optimizing its digital core.
The client is a premier provider of health, wellness, and lifestyle benefit solutions in the United States. They design, administer, and support large-scale enterprise benefit platforms that serve millions of users nationwide. Their digital ecosystem coordinates complex interactions between individual plan participants, corporate employers, healthcare providers, financial institutions, and retail partners. Handling millions of transactions daily, their platform is a critical utility where security, reliability, and continuous availability are paramount.
In the highly regulated healthcare and benefits sector, operational integrity is not just an IT metric; it is a compliance requirement. The platform must manage sensitive personal health information (PHI) and financial data, meaning that all systems must comply with strict federal security regulations, including HIPAA and SOC 2 guidelines. Furthermore, the platform processes complex batch files for payment transfers, tax-advantaged account contributions, and eligibility updates, requiring absolute precision in backend operations.
As their user base scaled, the client's underlying technology stack faced significant operational challenges. The core systems, built on legacy monolithic .NET frameworks, struggled to support the rapid release of new features required by their corporate clients. Release deployments were manual, slow, and carried high operational risks, occasionally causing system downtime or database synchronization lag. To address these issues, the client needed a modernization partner who could stabilize their active platform, implement modern DevOps workflows, and ensure continuous, secure delivery of their services.
The Challenge
Monolithic limits, release risks, and high transactional strain.
Prior to our partnership, the client's engineering operations were burdened by legacy architecture and manual processes. The core applications were tightly coupled monoliths, making it difficult to update individual features without redeploying the entire system. This dependency created significant deployment bottlenecks, leading to long development cycles and increased risk of operational errors.
At the same time, the platform had to handle high transaction volumes and run complex payment batch processes every day. Because the applications lacked automated monitoring and observability, the operational team had limited visibility into database lockups or message queuing delays. If a batch file failed to process overnight, the issue was often only discovered when customer support tickets began to escalate the following morning. The client needed to establish structured release governance, automate deployment pipelines, and introduce proactive monitoring to maintain continuous availability across their nationwide ecosystem.
100%
Target SLA adherence for application support tasks
Near-100%
Targeted uptime across public-facing benefit systems
Legacy monolithic architecture limited development speed and made systems hard to scale.
Tightly coupled systems created operational risks and stability issues during deployments.
High transaction volumes and complex batch processes required manual monitoring and verification.
Lack of centralized observability delayed the identification and resolution of system bottlenecks.
What our audit found
Tracing database lockups and deployment bottlenecks.
Our application operations and DevOps engineers conducted a comprehensive assessment of the client's software codebase, deployment pipelines, and database query flows. The diagnostic revealed that legacy SQL Server database queries and batch jobs were causing table-locking conflicts during business hours, resulting in interface lag and payment API timeouts. The systems lacked a messaging queue buffer, forcing the applications to process high-volume requests synchronously.
Additionally, the release pipeline was highly fragmented. Code integrations were managed manually, with developers merging files into a shared branch without automated testing or build validation. Deployments to staging and production servers were executed by system administrators using manual shell scripts, leaving the process open to configuration errors. To stabilize the platform, we needed to modernize the integration layer using Azure Functions and Service Bus, automate the release process in Azure DevOps, and deploy a comprehensive monitoring framework.
Synchronous processing of batch transactions caused database locks and system lag.
Legacy .NET codebase lacked modular integration layers, preventing independent component updates.
Manual deployment processes created frequent configuration errors and release delays.
Missing telemetry data made it difficult to troubleshoot issues or trace transaction failures.
The Solution
How we turned it around.
Legacy Modernization & Integration with Azure Services
We modernized the core integration layer by refactoring legacy monolithic components into microservices and serverless functions. We deployed Azure Functions to handle event-driven background tasks, such as automated notifications and file processing, and utilized Azure Service Bus as a reliable messaging queue. Service Bus acts as a decoupled buffer, absorbing transaction surges and distributing database write tasks asynchronously to prevent database locks and API timeouts.
What we shipped
- Refactored legacy monolithic modules into modular services using .NET Core.
- Deployed Azure Functions to process background tasks and data updates asynchronously.
- Implemented Azure Service Bus to buffer transactional loads and prevent system lockups.
Deploy CI/CD and Release Governance in Azure DevOps
We replaced the legacy manual release processes with automated Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines in Azure DevOps. We configured build pipelines to compile code, run unit tests, and perform vulnerability scans automatically upon code commit. The release pipelines utilize deployment gates and automated approval steps, allowing the team to deploy updates to staging and production environments with zero downtime and full auditability.
We established a structured monthly release cadence that has eliminated configuration errors and minimized deployment risks.
What we shipped
- Configured automated Azure DevOps pipelines for code compilation and testing.
- Implemented deployment gates and approval steps to secure production rollouts.
- Established a structured monthly release process, ensuring 100% SLA compliance.
Deploy Observability and Proactive Monitoring
To ensure complete system visibility, we deployed a comprehensive observability framework across the entire benefits platform. We integrated application performance monitoring (APM) tools to track transaction times, query execution speeds, and system resources in real-time. We configured custom alert thresholds for critical paths, ensuring that the operations team receives instant notifications for anomalies, such as failing payment APIs or delayed batch jobs, before they can impact users.
What we shipped
- Deployed application performance monitoring to track system health in real-time.
- Configured proactive alerts to identify and resolve transaction issues immediately.
- Achieved complete observability coverage with zero missed or untracked production signals.
The Numbers
Outcomes we can talk about.
The implementation of DevOps automation and application managed services successfully stabilized the client's nationwide benefits platform. By establishing automated CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps, the engineering team achieved a structured monthly release cadence with 100% SLA adherence across all application tasks. The deployment of Azure Service Bus and the refactoring of database queries eliminated transaction bottlenecks, enabling the platform to maintain near-100% uptime across high-volume, public-facing applications.
The introduction of proactive alerts has transformed the operational team from reactive troubleshooting to proactive maintenance. With complete observability coverage, there are now zero missed or untracked production signals, allowing the team to identify and resolve performance anomalies before they affect employers or healthcare providers. These stability improvements have provided the client with the operational resilience needed to scale their user base and support nationwide benefits administration without system disruption.
100%
SLA adherence
Near-100%
System uptime
Zero
Missed or untracked production signals
What We Built
What's Next
Scaling microservices and introducing automated regression testing.
With the release pipeline and monitoring stack stabilized, the next phase of the digital roadmap focuses on refactoring the remaining monolithic components into .NET Core microservices. This will further improve platform agility, allowing different development teams to build and deploy features independently.
Additionally, we plan to implement automated regression testing suites within the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that every code change undergoes extensive automated functional and security testing before deployment, further reducing release cycles.
Frequently Asked Questions
About This Project
The questions teams usually ask when they want to run a similar engagement.
Azure Service Bus acts as an asynchronous messaging queue. When thousands of users submit transactions simultaneously, the platform writes the requests to the queue rather than directly to the database. Workers then process the queue at a steady rate, preventing the database from being overwhelmed.
The Real Numbers
Need real numbers? Let's talk.
We kept the names off the page. The story is real, the outcomes are real, and we're always happy to walk a serious team through the rest of it.
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