NOS empowers developer collaboration and innovation on GitHub

"The purpose behind our rapid adoption of technologies is simple: we wanted to evolve the company’s collaboration culture."

Carlos Alexandre, Cloud Specialist at Ten Twenty One, explains why the parent company, NOS, underwent a major digital transformation. “Our company has over 500 active engineers who are working with the cloud and dealing with code day to day. Our main challenge was how to bring these teams together.” 

One of the changes that resulted from the continuous modernization of the organization's cloud practices was the adoption of infrastructure as code. To streamline these processes and foster a culture of knowledge-sharing, NOS created a team of early adopters and promoters. The aim was to ease and speed up adoption in every corner of the organization—and they found their partner to help achieve it in Microsoft.

“It wasn’t just about adopting a new tool, it was about reshaping the way they approach software development and cloud engineering,” comments Pedro Soares, Sr. Specialist for Azure App Innovation at Microsoft.

High adoption leads to increased vulnerabilities

GitHub Enterprise has been instrumental in empowering developers to build through better communication and collaboration. The huge adoption rate of GitHub Enterprise, evidenced by over 50% year-on-year increase in pull requests and repositories, shows just how many employees now rely on it. Using a single platform means developers don’t need to switch tools to complete day-to-day tasks, boosting productivity.

“With all the automation that came from using GitHub Actions, 20% of our pull requests are now automatically generated by bots and not by the developers, which is a huge increase in productivity,” says Carlos Graça, Director of the Cloud Center of Excellence at NOS.

Using the platform has also helped to safeguard the cloud environment, while developers are able to build and ship software more securely too. The organization fully adopted GitHub Advanced Security to improve passive security with custom patterns, secret scanners, and push protection.

“Proactive measures have been critical in safeguarding the integrity of our codebase and reducing vulnerabilities that could severely impact the business by around 50% so far,” says Carlos Graça. “This commitment to security reinforced our ability to scale operations effectively and securely."

“Another benefit was the removal of any friction between developers and security engineers. GitHub Advanced Security developers are now given their security feedback via a bot, reducing the ‘bad cop’ posture. It not only improves developer experience but also frees up time for security engineers to address more important tasks.”

Protecting the organization’s people, data, and infrastructure was a necessary step to lay the foundation for deploying other solutions, such as GitHub Copilot.

NOS´s continued transformation also motivated highly specialized technology teams to come together and form a subsidiary company called Ten Twenty One in early 2023. The team that worked on the transformation and adoption of GitHub, cloud, and other technologies for the organization now helps enterprise customers to modernize their systems, practices, and teams.

As a strategic partner, Ten Twenty One continues to play a key role in driving GitHub adoption within NOS and collaborates with Microsoft and GitHub to help enterprise customers in their journey to embrace GitHub. As Carlos Alexandre, puts it, “This is a story about building a collaboration that is able to unite all developers in a single hub.”