ProgramWorks’ clients were demanding a higher level of security and compliance than ever before. In addition, their on-premises hardware was starting to reach the end of life so they chose to migrate the entire ProgramWorks environment to the public cloud. That included both their external customer-facing operations, as well as the internal office environment — a massive undertaking. They also had a high maintenance hot backup system for emergencies that required modernization with load-balancing and high availability. Lacking the needed DevSecOps expertise, the company decided to seek outside implementation assistance. They first engaged with an IT services vendor and spent a number of months trying to work out a contract and Statement of Work to build and maintain the new cloud-based environment. After planning on a high-level strategy for rebuilding and migrating the environment, they couldn’t agree on a contract because the vendor could not guarantee compliance nor provide a quote for the whole project. This left the ProgramWorks team in the unenviable position of having to look for another solution mid-project.