By: Amol Natu, Principal Director – Leader for Manufacturing, Digital Transformation Partner, LTIMindtree

Given the endless possibilities and scope of Virtual Dojo, we believe that it will be an essential component in every company’s IT setup when it comes to establishing its innovation platform. So what goes into the making of a Virtual Dojo? For sure, it is not an exact clone or a mirror image of your existing IT application infrastructure.

The Virtual Dojo is built as an environment with the objective of helping teams get into an immersive and collaborative learning experience with a fully-equipped IT application landscape. This allows teams to learn new skills and technologies, and use them to innovate quickly as a team, than they could have individually.

Some of the key features of a Virtual Dojo include:

• Continuous feedback and refinement through regular stakeholder and user engagement
• Collaboration with a wide range of technology vendors and SMEs
• Development using the latest technologies and platforms depending on the business need
• Development using continuous integration and delivery techniques
• Event and micro-service driven architecture
• Automated functional and non-functional testing of services
• Cultural ways-of-working and technical upskilling of client’s resources
• Demonstratable outputs, including packaged code in designated client repositories
• Rapid discovery via design thinking, orientation, and immersion workshops
• Getting technical skills and experience in DevOps, utilizing infrastructure-as-code development on AWS

Benefits of a Virtual Dojo

Some of the key benefits of a Virtual Dojo include:

• Enables organizations to accelerate innovation and reduce discovery investment and timescale
• Accelerates new business opportunities to increase revenue and/or reduce costs
• Transforms business services, enabling intelligent, agile, and robust operations
• Enables informed decision-making based on user-centered designs
• Supports new business models through iterative design and development
• Enables organizations to pay for what is used and only when it is needed
• Reduces upfront investments allowing infrastructure to scale with business growth
• Drives optimized infrastructure utilization allowing efficient use of resources with reduced costs
• Reduces time-to-market for new features/services, while reducing up-front investment/installation lead-times

DevSecOps: Baking Security in the Pipeline

Security in DevOps must cover a complete view of security, including security culture, secure software delivery, and secure infrastructure. In a Virtual Dojo, threats can be simulated and customized, which ensures that organizations can visualize the infrastructure and take appropriate actions.

They can also undertake the following activities:

• Conduct a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) exercise to assess the current stage
• Create a future-state value stream map with security aspects covered
• Create a hypothesis for the changes identified in the VSM exercise
• Guide team and customer SMEs on the implementation of how to solve the hypothesis

Enabling Customer Experimentation Using Virtual Dojo

Customer orientation for using Virtual Dojo can be done by following the steps given below:

• The LTIMindtree team partners with the customer to show how a solution can be achieved using a Proof of Concept.
• Hypothesis creation for the problem is facilitated by LTIMindtree experts.
• The LTIMindtree team guides customer SMEs on the implementation of how to solve the hypothesis by following proper DevOps and SRE processes.
• Conducting a Value Stream Management exercise.

Improvement of current DevOps implementation

The existing DevOps implementation can be improved by undertaking the following steps:

• DevOps Assessment
• Hypothesis creation for the changes identified in the assessment will be facilitated by LTIMindtree experts.
• LTIMindtree team members will guide customer SMEs on the implementation of how to solve the hypothesis following proper DevOps and SRE processes.
• Conducting a Value Stream Management exercise

A brief about LTIMindtree’s Virtual Dojo enablement service

LTIMindtree’s Virtual Dojo enablement services is an industry-focused, application, and infrastructure-enabled set of services that helps clients move their innovation platform swiftly and safely to the cloud. As part of the Virtual Dojo-enabled services, we offer a full range of planning services designed to define the Innovation Virtual Dojo, including industry-tailored insights and strategies to prioritize innovation ideas, complemented by design thinking with a path to production.

LTIMindtree can help in defining the innovation environment setup. This includes the current IT application setup, the cloud strategy, application migration assessment, and planning and infrastructure assessment. LTIMindtree confirms the migration type and effort and conducts code-level assessments to determine the degree of fit for the target platform.