Platform Engineering: How rethinking your DevOps can save 15% of your IT budget
If you're an IT Director in financial services, you've likely noticed something troubling. Despite investing heavily in DevOps tools and hiring specialized engineers, your teams still struggle with slow onboarding, unclear responsibilities, and developers spending more time configuring environments than delivering business value. You're not alone - and more importantly, this isn't a technology problem.
When IT-for-IT Forgets It's Serving Customers
Consider a familiar situation when a new development team is assembled and ready to begin work on a business-critical application. Before they can even start crafting the core business logic, however, their progress is halted by procedural requirements. First, they must navigate a complex request process, which involves opening seven distinct tickets with various specialized departments. These requests are dispatched to separate teams managing infrastructure, networking, databases, DevOps, security, observability, and cloud services, each with its own queue and lead time.
Three weeks and countless Slack messages later, they finally have a working environment. That's €17,280 wasted per team onboarding, just in developer salaries sitting idle or doing work that creates no business value.
Now multiply that across every new initiative, every production release, every bug that requires hunting through disconnected tools to find root causes. In a typical mid-sized financial institution with 300 IT professionals, these inefficiencies cost approximately €2.2 million annually - roughly 15% of your total IT labor budget. That's not a rounding error; that's the cost of several strategic initiatives.
Tip of an iceberg: based onprojects in large organizations / enterprises
Intrigued by these numbers? Let's explore what they could mean for your business. Schedule a free consultation to see a model tailored to your organization.
But here's what makes this particularly insidious: you won't see this in your productivity reports. When developers spend days configuring Jenkins pipelines or waiting for database provisioning, they log it as "application development." When teams build shadow CI/CD because the official one is too slow, it appears as feature work. The waste is invisible—until you measure it properly.
Not a Tool, But a Business Model for IT
This is where Platform Engineering fundamentally differs from traditional DevOps approaches. It's not about deploying Kubernetes or adopting Backstage. Platform Engineering is an organizational transformation that treats software delivery as a business process and developers as internal customers deserving product-quality service.
Think about it this way: Would you tell your retail customers to write SQL INSERT statements directly into your database to make a purchase? Of course not—you build an elegant e-commerce platform that abstracts complexity. Yet that's essentially what many IT organizations do to their internal developers: provide them with raw tools and expect them to orchestrate everything themselves.
Platform Engineering flips this model. It requires three critical elements working in concert:
Platform Technology – Standardized, automated tooling covering the complete software delivery lifecycle, from code repositories through CI/CD, observability, security, and runtime, organized and simplified around developer needs, not tool capabilities.
Platform Operating Model – Crystal-clear responsibility boundaries defining what the Platform Team provides as a service versus what application teams own. This includes structured service definitions with SLAs, not ad-hoc talk arrangements.
Platform Team – Engineers with a product mindset who think about developer cognitive load, not just technical perfection. Their job is enabling others, not just managing tools.
Here's what's crucial to understand: If any of these three elements is missing, you don't have a platform—you have an expensive chaos. A Platform Team without clear operating models doesn't know what they're accountable for. Technology without a Platform Team means distributed responsibility and nobody answering when things break. An operating model without technology means well-intentioned bureaucracy that can't scale.
Economies of Scale in Financial Services
For financial institutions facing increased regulatory pressure, fierce fintech competition, and margin compression, Platform Engineering delivers something rare: economies of scale in software delivery.
Instead of linear cost growth—where adding 10 teams means 10x more DevOps headcount—platforms enable logarithmic scaling. Your 20th application onboards as fast as your first. Your 50th service inherits the same security posture, observability, and operational excellence as your 10th. You can compete on delivery speed with fintechs while maintaining enterprise-grade governance.
This matters for hiring too. Cross-functional teams require unicorns who understand everything from Kubernetes internals to application architecture to security compliance. These people are expensive and rare. Platform teams need specialists, but application teams can hire for business domain expertise and let the platform abstract the complexity. You democratize DevOps capabilities while actually improving quality.
Analysis First, Technology Last
Here's where most initiatives fail: they start with technology selection. Wrong questions, wrong sequence.
Road to Internal Developer Platform
Interested in our approach? Schedule a free consultation to see how it can work for you.
The correct approach follows three phases:
Analysis Phase - Before touching any code, understand your current state:
Map your software delivery value streams using techniques like Value Stream Mapping
Interview teams to discover pain points at both process and emotional levels
Assess your technology landscape for gaps, overlaps, and reusability opportunities
Define clear service boundaries and operating model based on team maturity
This is where Exerizon's Platform Analysis Framework creates value. We don't start with architecture diagrams - we start with structured cognitive load discovery using questionnaires, interviews, and value stream mapping. We assess not just what tools you have, but whether your teams can actually use them effectively given their skill level and workload.
Delivery Phase - With clear analysis, you can now:
Design platform services addressing your specific bottlenecks
Implement operating models as actual permissions and roles in tools
Build automation targeting your highest-impact pain points first
Create the minimal portal or interface your teams actually need
Operations Phase - This is continuous improvement:
Measure SLAs on service delivery time, not tool uptime
Collect developer satisfaction metrics actively
Expand services based on real usage patterns and requests
Adjust operating model boundaries as teams mature
You might not need Backstage or any other fancy technology. You might start with just a Jira form and Python scripts that orchestrate your existing tools. The thinnest viable platform that solves real problems beats the perfectly engineered platform that arrives too late.
In Exerizon We Believe Platform Engineering Is 80% Organization and 20% Technology
Most consulting firms approach Platform Engineering as an infrastructure project. They'll deploy Kubernetes, configure ArgoCD, install Backstage, and leave you with sophisticated technology that your teams can't or won't use because it doesn't match their needs, maturity, or workflows.
Exerizon's Platform Analysis & Delivery Framework inverts this:
We start by understanding your organization – team structures, regulatory constraints, current practices, pain points, and strategic goals. We use proven techniques from product management applied to internal IT.
We design services, not just tools – What should application provisioning look like for your teams? What abstractions reduce cognitive load without blocking power users? What should the Platform Team own versus application teams?
We deliver incrementally – Target highest-impact services first, prove value quickly, expand based on feedback. This isn't a 12-month transformation; you can see ROI in weeks.
We build sustainability – Transfer knowledge, establish product ownership, create operational models that outlive the engagement.
We've built this framework through years of hands-on platform management across multiple organizations, supporting over 1,000 microservices and 250+ developers. We've made the mistakes so you don't have to.
Get a clear platform strategy and data-backed ROI projections in as little as two weeks. Our Platform Analysis provides the exact roadmap your organization needs to move forward. Schedule a free consultation to learn how.
From Cost Center to Strategic Enabler
Platform Engineering won't just save you €2M annually—though that's certainly valuable in today's environment of margin pressure and efficiency mandates. The real transformation is strategic positioning.
With an effective platform, your IT organization shifts from being a cost center that business tolerates to being a strategic enabler that accelerates competitive advantage. Your time-to-market for new products drops from quarters to weeks. Your ability to attract and retain top developers improves because they spend time on meaningful work, not fighting tools. Your operational risk decreases because standardization and automation reduce human error.
And critically for financial services: your compliance and security posture improves because platform - enforced patterns mean every application inherits the same vetted security controls, observability, and change management. You achieve regulatory efficiency at scale.
The question isn't whether to adopt Platform Engineering - your competitors already are. The question is whether you'll do it strategically, with proper analysis and operating model design, or reactively by buying tools that create new problems.
Start with understanding your current cognitive load. Define services that address real pain. Build incrementally with clear ownership. Measure relentlessly.
Your developers aren't asking for more tools. They're asking to focus on what you're actually paying them to do: deliver business value. Platform Engineering makes that possible.
