Customer story — Automotive · 2025

From manual to modern

How MSX International transformed cloud infrastructure delivery with Brainboard — building a self-service, secure, template-driven model on Azure across a global automotive technology business.

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 — an end-to-end platform for visually designing and managing cloud infrastructure with Terraform — 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

Provisioning relied on manual interaction with the Azure Portal — each resource configured individually. The fragmented, time-consuming approach increased the risk of human error and made consistent standards hard to enforce across environments.

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 requests funneling exclusively through a small cloud engineering team, velocity suffered. Developers lacked the tools to self-serve, and engineers were consumed by repetitive provisioning rather than higher-value architectural work.

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

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 became MSXI's end-to-end platform for visually creating and managing cloud infrastructure with Terraform. At the heart of the solution was a producer / consumer model.

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.

PRODUCT — Visual architecture canvas

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, 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

"Brainboard has transformed the way I architect, document, and automate cloud environments. Its visual-first design lets me model complex Azure infrastructure — VNets, private endpoints, Cosmos DB, App Services, Key Vaults — while instantly generating clean, production-ready Terraform. Built-in Checkov, TFSec, and Terrascan baselines plus cost estimation reduce drift and accelerate reviews. It's become foundational to our Azure IaC lifecycle."
John Nguasong
Cloud Engineer, MSX International

"Brainboard has allowed MSX International to move to a modern DevOps approach — deploying Azure resources in a controlled, secure, repeatable way. With minimal inputs, any team member can deploy secure environments that meet industry standards. The support from the team has been exceptional — one of the best third-party engagements I've experienced."
Stephen Tower
Senior Global Cloud Team Lead, MSX International

What's next

Expanding the engagement

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.cosales@brainboard.co

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