Customer story · Automotive · FROM MANUAL TO MODERN

MSX International Case Study: 3x Faster Azure Infrastructure Delivery with Brainboard

After adopting Brainboard, MSX International reduced average infrastructure deployment time from 3 days to 1 day, cut developer self-service provisioning from 6 days to 2, saved 64 FTE hours per month, and achieved a 90% template reuse rate across its Azure environments. Security checks now catch 5–10 issues per deployment before anything is provisioned, avoiding an estimated 1–2 days of remediation per project.

Microsoft AzureTerraformSelf-service IaCShift-left security

3×

3 times faster deployment

64 FTE hours saved per month

90%

90% template reuse rate

1 day

from 3 to 1 day average time-to-deploy

Industry

Automotive BPO

Scale

80 countries

Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Use case

Self-service IaC

Engagement

2025

On this page

Executive summary About MSX International The challenge Goals & scope The solution Implementation Results In their words What's next

Executive summary

Reimagining how infrastructure is delivered

MSX International (MSXI), a global leader in technology-enabled BPO for the automotive industry, faced a growing tension between the pace of cloud demand and the capacity of its cloud engineering team. Manual, portal-driven workflows, inconsistent standards, and a high barrier to Infrastructure-as-Code adoption were creating bottlenecks across development, testing, and proof-of-concept environments.

In 2025, MSXI partnered with Brainboard to fundamentally reimagine how infrastructure is built, secured, and delivered. The result was a scalable producer / consumer model that enabled developer self-service, embedded security from the start, and brought repeatable standards to every deployment.

About MSX International

25 years, 80 countries

For over 25 years, MSX International has been a trusted partner to automotive manufacturers worldwide, delivering technology-enabled BPO services that drive efficiency, performance, and customer satisfaction across the automotive value chain. Operating across 80 countries and serving some of the world's largest vehicle manufacturers, MSXI's engineering and technology teams are responsible for managing complex, mission-critical cloud environments at scale.

The challenge

A cloud team stretched to its limits

Manual, error-prone workflows

Prior to engaging Brainboard, MSXI's cloud provisioning process relied heavily on manual interaction with the Azure Portal. Each resource was configured individually. It included a fragmented, time-consuming approach that increased the risk of human error and made it difficult to enforce consistent standards across environments.

Proof-of-concept, development, and test environment requests frequently stalled, bottlenecked by a small cloud engineering team executing provisioning tasks by hand.

No repeatable standards

Without standardized IaC templates, every deployment was built from scratch. Security configurations, networking policies, and resource settings varied between environments, and issues were often discovered only after deployment, requiring costly remediation.

A bottleneck that couldn't scale

With provisioning requests funneling exclusively through a small cloud engineering team,velocity suffered. Developers lacked the tools to self-serve, and cloud engineers were consumed by repetitive provisioning tasks rather than higher-value architectural work. The model was unsustainable as demand for cloud resources continued to grow.

The core problem

Dev and test environment requests took 3+ days on average, with cloud engineers spending the majority of their time on repetitive provisioning instead of strategic architecture.

Goals & scope

MSXI entered the Brainboard engagement with three clear objectives:

Enable developer self-service

Reduce dependency on the cloud team for routine provisioning and unblock dev, test, and POC environments.

Lower the IaC learning curve

Give non-cloud engineers a path to Terraform without requiring deep HCL or cloud-architecture expertise from day one.

Embed security by default

Move security validation earlier in the lifecycle — shifting left to catch issues before they reach production.

The solution

A producer / consumer model, powered by Brainboard

Brainboard was implemented as MSXI's end-to-end platform for visually creating and managing cloud infrastructure using Terraform. At the heart of the solution was a producer/consumer model: the cloud engineering team (producers) would build and own a library of standardized, parameterized templates, while developers (consumers) could deploy pre-approved infrastructure patterns independently, without writing Terraform from scratch.

Producers

Cloud CoE team

Build and own a library of standardized, parameterized templates.

Consumers

Developers

Deploy pre-approved patterns independently — without writing Terraform from scratch.

Visual Architecture Canvas

One of the most immediate pain points for MSXI was the fragmented, resource-by-resource view created by Azure Portal workflows. Brainboard addressed this with its visual architecture canvas, which allows teams to design a complete infrastructure deployment holistically on a single canvas, with that diagram mapping directly to deployable Terraform code.

This visual-first approach delivered several key benefits:

Clearer scope and resource relationships - Architects and developers could see exactly how resources connected, reducing miscommunication and design errors before any code was deployed.

Faster onboarding - New team members could understand the shape of an environment visually, dramatically reducing onboarding time.

Reduced design mistakes - Catching structural issues at the diagram stage is far less costly than catching them post-deployment.

Workloads covered across MSXI's environments include: App Services, Virtual Machines, KeyVault, Storage Accounts, Databricks, Container Registry, and all aspects of Azure networking.

Reusable Templates & Parameterized Modules

Brainboard worked with MSXI's cloud engineering team to develop a library of standardized, parameterized templates for the organization's most common infrastructure patterns. These templates produce consistent Terraform IaC and feed directly into automated deployment pipelines.A clear ownership model was established: the cloud team owns and maintains the template library; consuming teams select and parameterize templates appropriate to their workload without modifying the underlying standards.

Visual architecture canvas

Design a complete deployment on one canvas that maps directly to deployable Terraform — clearer resource relationships, faster onboarding, and design mistakes caught at the diagram stage.

App ServicesVirtual MachinesKey VaultStorageDatabricksContainer RegistryAzure networking

Reusable templates & modules

A library of standardized, parameterized templates producing consistent Terraform that feeds automated pipelines. The cloud team owns the standards; consuming teams parameterize without modifying them.

90% reuse rate~2 days saved / deploy

Embedded Security: Shifting Left

Security validation was moved from a post-deployment remediation activity to a pre-deployment checkpoint. Brainboard's embedded checklists and security checks run at deployment time, flagging issues before infrastructure is provisioned.

MSXI implemented a tiered enforcement model:
Non-blocking reporting for development - Developers are informed of issues without being blocked, supporting a learning-first culture.
Stricter policy enforcement for production - Configurations that don't meet security standards cannot be deployed without review and approval.

Security checks in use include:
- App Service resiliency validation
- Key Vault access policy review
- Networking restriction enforcement
- Role and binding best practices
- Cryptographic standards validation

Brainboard's drift detection capability was implemented to identify when live cloud environments diverge from their declared Terraform state. The current rollout focuses on the cloud engineeringteam, with a planned expansion to surface non-blocking drift alerts for developer teams.

Embedded security, shifted left

Security moved from post-deploy remediation to a pre-deploy checkpoint — non-blocking reporting in dev (learning-first), strict enforcement in prod.

App Service resiliency · Key Vault access policy · Networking restrictions · Role & binding best practices · Cryptographic standards

5–10 caught / deploy1–2 days avoided / project

Drift detection & policy enforcement

Detects when live environments diverge from declared Terraform state. The current rollout focuses on the cloud team, with planned expansion to non-blocking developer alerts.

5 incidents tracked~1 hr to remediate90% under enforcement

"Brainboard has allowed us to pre-bake the security configuration into every deployment using templates, enforcing security standards from the start — and reducing the workload on the Cloud CoE team."

Stephen Tower · Senior Global Cloud Team Lead, MSXI

Implementation journey

A phased rollout

Discovery

May 2025

Audit of existing workflows; identification of priority workloads and template candidates.

Templating

May 2025

Template creation, parameterization, and validation in sandbox environments.

Rollout & training

May 2025

Developer onboarding, training sessions, and phased self-service enablement (dev → test → production).

Trained · 8 CoE + 11 devs

Training sessions

~1 mo

Time-to-proficiency

Challenges & remediation

Permissions complexity

Deployment behavior varied by identity role (Owner, Contributor, limited Service Principal). Tests were isolated under owner-level permissions, and minimal required roles plus recommended IAM configurations were documented for repeatable future deployments.

Azure Databricks provisioning

Workspace-level resources deployed cleanly, but compute-cluster provisioning spanned two systems (Azure and Databricks) and required dedicated technical workshops — resulting in a fully working template now available for all future Databricks deployments.

The partnership — more than a platform

Beyond providing software, Brainboard operated as an active partner — supporting onboarding, troubleshooting in real time, and iterating on templates based on feedback. A continuous-improvement cadence reviews platform and templates on a six-month cycle to keep the solution evolving with MSXI's needs.

Results

Measurable outcomes

Metric

Before

After Brainboard

Average time-to-deploy

3 days

1 day

Developer self-service provisioning

6 days

2 days

Provisioning support tickets

High volume

Sharply reduced

FTE hours saved / month

—

64 hours

Developers now self-serve from a governed, secure set of deployment patterns — no request to the cloud team required.

Cloud engineers reclaimed time previously lost to repetitive provisioning for higher-value architecture and governance.

The organization deepened its Terraform and Azure expertise through platform-guided learning.

In their own words

"As an Azure Cloud Engineer, Brainboard has transformed the way I architect,document, and automate cloud environments. Its visual‑first design allows me to model complex Azure infrastructures, including VNets, subnets, private endpoints, Cosmos DB accounts, App Services, Key Vaults, and more, while instantly generating clean, production‑ready Terraform code.

What sets Brainboard apart is how well the generated Terraform aligns with real engineering standards. It produces module‑based architectures, supports reusable locals, variables and handles dynamic blocks cleanly, making the code both scalable and maintainable. Even advanced configurations like CMK encryption, private DNS zone mappings, diagnostic settings, and network security layering are generated with impressive accuracy.

The integrated CI/CD pipelines, combined with built‑in security and compliance baselines such as Checkov, TFSec, and Terrascan, provide automatic guardrails for every change. Paired with infrastructure cost estimation, these controls significantly reduce configuration drift, enforce consistency, and accelerate architecture and security review processes.

Brainboard has become foundational to our Azure IaC lifecycle, from initial diagramming and code generation to automated deployment into dev, test, and production environments. It eliminates the manual effort of diagram creation, ensures reproducible infrastructure across environments, and shortens delivery timelines dramatically.

The Brainboard support team has also been exceptional: responsive, knowledgeable, and always ready to assist with deep technical questions.

On a personal level, Brainboard has accelerated my growth in Terraform. Its ability to visualize, refine, and generate complex IaC has made me far more confident managing Azure through Terraform than through the traditional Azure Portal. It has elevated both my efficiency and the overall quality of our cloud deployments.

Brainboard also offers many additional features, such as GitHub integration,Terraform module management, and Azure DevOps integration, that I am still exploring and look forward to leveraging more fully.

For teams building secure, modular, and automated Azure platforms using Terraform and modern CI/CD practices, Brainboard is an invaluable tool."

John Nguasong, Cloud Engineer, MSX International

Brainboard has primarily allowed MSX International to move a modern DevOps approach to deploying Azure resources in a controlled, secure, manageable and repeatable way.

Previously Azure resources were deployed using the portal or standard alone Terraform scripts. Brainboard has allowed us to move those deployments into a structured, templated deployment method. With minimal inputs any member of the team are able to deploy secure environments that adhere to industry standards and best practices.

As a lead of the Cloud CoE team in MSX International it is essential that we are able to deploy Azure resources at scale, quickly, securely and to a set standard. Brainboard has accelerated this journey and has enabled all team members to rapidly increase and improve their knowledge and learnings around Azure and Terraform. Brainboard has transformed the team’s knowledge of Azure resources and deployment standards.

As Brainboard has been used more and more within MSX International we have built up extensive templates of environments, allowing them to be duplicated and sync’d across environments. The architectural canvas view has been very useful in terms of showing the business and stakeholders what the deployments will look like, from a resource and security perspective.

The CI/CD pipeline with its security elements is vital to understanding where environments may differ from security baselines, allowing the security issues to be fixed before deployments, not after which can traditionally be very difficult. The cost estimation part of the CI/CD is a great tool allowing estimation of cost which provides the business with estimated before deployment costs.

GitHub Integration is a great addition allowing the backup of code and the state file management is simple, very easy to use and effective.

A requirement for our development team to be able to self-serve to quickly deploy POC’s for customers’ needs has only been made possible with Brainboard. With an extensive catalogue of templates and security standards incorporated, it has been possible for our development team to be able to deploy Azure resources with low levels of Terraform knowledge, the canvas view being essential to this.

The one critical element that has been present throughout our engagement with Brainboard is the support from the team at Brainboard. From the initial training, troubleshooting, support, mentoring, fault-finding and overall assistance the team at Brainboard has been nothing short of excellent. Their focus on continual improvements is impressive, allowing the team at MSX International to contribute to product improvements going forward.

No issue is too much trouble and the engagement between Brainboard andMSX International has been exceptional with regular meetings and technicalworkshops taking place. Personally it has been one of the best engagementswith a third party I have experienced.

On a personal level Brainboard has been essential to drive my team’s operational excellence forward and I am very excited about what the future holds for Brainboard and MSX International.

Stephen Tower, Senior Global Cloud Team Lead, MSX International

What's next

Expanding the engagement

MSXI and Brainboard continue to expand the scope of the engagement. Planned next steps include:

Full rollout of drift-detection alerts to developer teams.

Expansion of the template library to cover additional workload patterns.

Tighter integration of policy enforcement across production environments.

Ongoing training as new engineers join the platform.

Continued platform improvements to further accelerate time-to-production.

About Brainboard

Brainboard is an end-to-end platform for visually designing, automating, and managing cloud infrastructure with Terraform. Combining a visual canvas with production-grade IaC generation, reusable template libraries, and embedded security controls, it helps organizations accelerate cloud delivery while maintaining the standards and governance modern infrastructure demands.

brainboard.co[email protected]

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