No industry is untouched by the radical transformations brought by cloud and mobile computing over the past decade. That’s why organizations around the world turn to Infosys for help building and maintaining technology. Infosys is one of the largest IT consulting companies in the world, with more than 200,000 employees working in practically every industry you can imagine. They keep up with the latest technologies and best engineering practices, enabling companies to focus on their own customers. As a live enterprise, Infosys takes on the challenge of becoming more resilient itself and helping its clients too.

Infosys supports all the applications its customers use, including multiple source code management, CI/CD, and application lifecycle management systems and they prefer to use GitHub when possible. “Our customers have made investments in certain toolsets and we would leverage those investments and make it work for them,” says Naresh Choudhary, Vice President of Reuse and Tools. “As part of the best practices for DevSecOps, we recommend our DevSecOps platform, methods, and GitHub as a key part of this ecosystem. As our customers’ processes mature, we expect to see more and more use of GitHub Enterprise.”

Naresh says Infosys prefers GitHub for five key reasons. One simple reason is providing developers with continuity. “GitHub is where engineers feel most comfortable because they already know the mechanics of it, they know the terminology,” he says. “That’s especially true for younger engineers. People transitioning from school to the workplace already know how to use GitHub.” That means far less time spent training new employees before they can be productive.

Another element of continuity is the ability to access code and other assets while working remotely or in the field client offices. “Our employees can be just as productive as they could be if they were sitting in the office,” Naresh says. “Meanwhile, with GitHub Organizational Permissions we have the same level of control over our IP. We can still set access controls the same way we would in the office. It’s the best of both worlds.” That’s important as the company continues to support remote work into the foreseeable future.

Process is the big factor in Infosys’s use of GitHub. “When you tie automated tasks to pull requests, you don’t need to remind people to do those things anymore,” shared Naresh. “People don’t like being nagged, so automation increases developer happiness.” Modernizing processes also means less retraining of people, because the new process can be run automatically, instead of relying on employees to follow checklists. The result is fewer process errors while developers spend more time focusing on creating value for customers. “Our own team has been able to go much faster,” Naresh says. “Our velocity is 20% higher thanks to our Integrated Digital Infra with Infosys DevSecOps and GitHub playing a critical role.”

When you tie automated tasks to pull requests, you don’t need to remind people to do those things anymore. People don’t like being nagged, so automation increases developer happiness. Our own team has been able to go much faster.

The ability to easily extend GitHub’s functionality through integrations is another. Infosys uses a wide variety of tools, from Jira to Visual Studio, and it’s helpful to have a centralized system that everything can tie into. Centralization also makes it easier to keep track of everything else integrated with GitHub because actions are tied to pull requests. “The ability to track changes becomes critical from an audit trail perspective,” Naresh says.

Alongside existing investments on security, Infosys is starting to leverage GitHub Advanced Security to secure the code as part of the software development workflow. In addition to scanning their existing code base, Infosys uses pre-commit hooks to make sure that code with known security defects never makes it into a repo. “A lot of problems get nipped in the bud this way,” Naresh says.

Finally, there’s collaboration. “GitHub is the easiest way for developers to share and discuss code,” Naresh says. “It brings a level of visibility that helps everyone in the value chain do their best.” This is particularly helpful for helping employees grow as developers. “When you see each other’s work, you can learn from each other,” he says. “You get motivated to improve your own work and innovate further.”

Code reuse is a major goal for Infosys. Infosys Code Store, powered by GitHub in the back end, is made available for developers to collaborate on all Infosys built code components and tools, to facilitate easy access and download of reusable solutions. “With GitHub, our team is able to build applications with significantly reduced effort,” Naresh says. “Most teams leveraging these assets save 20% of their effort, easily.”

Whether it’s internal code use or working with the open-source community, Infosys uses GitHub to collaborate and share their expertise with customers and the world. The company is doing their best to share their knowledge with other companies to push the state of technology further. And they’re still pushing themselves as well. “I don’t think we can say we’ve implemented everything we want to yet,” Naresh says. “And we probably never will because it’s a continual journey of excellence as a live enterprise, we’ll continue to challenge ourselves and keep evolving.”