We have found a huge benefit in having a virtualisation environment with the firewall development process. Previously it was a lot more labour intensive in terms of burning ISO images of builds, testing the CD burned, and running up the install on physical hardware.
With a virtual environment, we can eliminate the time consuming “rinse and repeat” process of constantly reburning a CD image and installing it, by directly mounting the image to a virtual machine, and testing the install. This reduces one part of the development process from nearly two weeks of work to two days – a massive saving, especially when R & D resources are always scarce.
Any process that can save that amount of time fits really well with two things we are very keen on at IT Partners – productivity, and using tools from Lean Manufacturing within professional service firms.
Right now we are making further investment in internal systems, resources, and relationships – if you think you have something to offer, talk to us!