Infosys Ltd. Client

Enabling Secure, Governed Self-Service for Cloud and AI at Enterprise Scale

Infosys is a global leader in AI-first business consulting and technology services, with more than 300,000 technologists driving digital transformation for clients across industries worldwide. At this scale, the challenge is significant: how do you give developers the speed, autonomy, and self-service capabilities they need to innovate, experiment, and deliver solutions rapidly, while maintaining governance across nearly 1,000 cloud accounts, 200+ cloud services, and the stringent security, compliance, and cost management requirements of a global enterprise?

For InfosysIT, Backstage became the foundation for addressing that challenge.

InfosysIT designed and deployed an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) powered by Backstage, creating a single, governed entry point through which developers can access approved cloud, SaaS, and AI services. What once required navigating multiple portals, teams, and approval processes can now be provisioned in minutes through a streamlined self-service experience, with security, compliance, and governance built in by default.

By using Backstage as the platform orchestration layer, InfosysIT has simplified the developer experience at enterprise scale, accelerated innovation through self-service, and established a consistent operating model across a rapidly growing ecosystem of cloud, AI, and platform services. The result demonstrates how an extensible cloud native developer portal can help balance developer autonomy with enterprise governance, enabling thousands of developers to move faster without compromising security or control.

“Governance must be applied at creation time, not after deployment.” – Infosys IT

Challenge: When scale becomes a liability

As InfosysIT’s internal operations expanded to support a global workforce, the challenges in its traditional IT delivery model became hard to ignore. Cloud environments were proliferating across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Teams were independently adopting AI model APIs and SaaS tools, often without visibility from security or platform teams. Meanwhile, infrastructure and governance teams were dealing with growing volumes of manual requests.

The symptoms were predictable:

• Inconsistent environments that created toil for every team touching them.
• Shadow usage of cloud and AI services that security could not see or audit.
• Reactive governance that identified issues only after deployment, when remediation was more difficult.
• Platform and security teams bottlenecked by repetitive, manual work.

InfosysIT needed a model that could serve tens of thousands of users across hundreds of cloud accounts without creating an operations team that scaled linearly with demand.

Solution: Backstage as a platform orchestration layer

Backstage provided more than a software catalog. Its extensibility made it possible to create a genuine platform orchestration layer: a single front door through which developers could discover, request, and consume approved services spanning cloud infrastructure, enterprise SaaS, and AI platforms.

With Backstage providing the consistent developer experience, underlying complexity could be abstracted away. Developers no longer need to interact directly with raw cloud consoles, unmanaged API keys, or opaque IAM policies. Instead, they interact with a clean, consistent interface backed by automated workflows that enforce InfosysIT’s standards before a single resource is created.

For developers, that means self-service speed without raw console access.

For platform teams, it means defining blueprints instead of executing individual requests.

For security and audit teams, it means continuous audit readiness by default.

For Developers	For Platform Teams	For Security & Audit
Self-service speed without raw console access	Define blueprints, not execute requests	Continuous audit readiness by default

Impact: One Backstage Experience for Cloud, SaaS, and AI

One of the most important design decisions was to use the same platform rigor for AI services as for cloud infrastructure. Rather than allowing model APIs to be accessed informally while AI governance evolved, InfosysIT brought those services into the same Backstage-powered consumption model.

Whether a developer is requesting an AWS VPC, an Azure subscription, a SaaS integration, or access to a managed AI service, the experience through Backstage is consistent:

• Discover: Explore a catalog of services approved, validated, and vetted by InfosysIT.
• Select: Choose a predefined blueprint that encodes security, networking, and cost standards.
• Contextualize: Provide minimal business metadata, including team, cost center, and use case.
• Provision: Receive a fully configured, governed environment in minutes, not days.

That consistency becomes particularly important at enterprise scale. When service consumption workflows follow the same pattern, developers can learn the process once and apply it across services. Platform teams can maintain one governance model, while security teams gain a single, predictable posture to monitor.

Governance Embedded Through Backstage Workflows

Every provisioning workflow exposed through the Backstage platform embeds governance at the point of creation:

• Security baselines are applied automatically, preventing developers from provisioning a non-compliant environment.
• Mandatory ownership and cost tagging ensure every resource has an accountable team.
• Network and access constraints are enforced by infrastructure-as-code rather than post-deployment audits.
• Logging, monitoring, and observability integrations are wired in from day one.

The result is governance that is reliable and invisible. Audit readiness is continuous, exceptions are rare rather than routine, and security teams can shift their attention from firefighting toward strategic improvement.

Rather than placing governance outside the developer workflow, the Backstage-powered model makes governance part of the workflow itself.

From Platform Gatekeepers to Platform Enablers

The Backstage-powered platform has also supported a significant change in how InfosysIT’s platform engineering teams operate.

Instead of repeatedly executing provisioning requests, platform engineers define golden blueprints that encode best practices for cloud accounts, AI environments, and service integrations. Those reusable patterns are then made available through the platform for developers to consume through self-service.

As a result, platform engineers can focus on second-order problems—including improving resilience patterns, optimizing cost models, and extending the platform’s capabilities—rather than re-executing the same provisioning steps for the hundredth time.

Resilience as a Platform Capability

Backstage also provides the interface through which resilience engineering can become a repeatable, first-class platform capability.

With controlled workflows available directly through Backstage, teams can introduce intentional failures, network disruptions, dependency faults, and resource constraints to validate observability and alerting. This helps teams understand how systems behave under stress and build genuine recovery readiness rather than relying on assumptions.

Solution Architecture

[Solution architecture diagram]

Backstage serves as the developer-facing platform layer, alongside the following technologies:

• Terraform, Python, and REST APIs for service provisioning.
• GitHub Actions and self-hosted GitHub runners for CI pipelines.
• HashiCorp Vault for dynamic credentials.
• Azure Autoscale for Backstage hosting.
• Azure Graph API for sending email notifications.
• Azure Entra ID for authentication.
• PostgreSQL for database requirements.

Impact at Enterprise Scale

The Backstage-powered platform is designed to scale efficiently, supporting 1,000+ cloud provider accounts, more than 25,000 software developers, and 200+ cloud services, while remaining extensible enough to onboard additional SaaS providers as required.

The impact extends beyond infrastructure metrics:

• 80–90% reduction in provisioning and onboarding lead time.
• Lead time reduced from hours to minutes.
• 40–70% reduction in manual operational effort.
• 10x faster developer onboarding for cloud native services.
• 20–30% improvement in developer productivity, based on reduced idle/wait time.

Together, these outcomes show how a Backstage-powered self-service model can translate platform engineering into measurable improvements for developers, platform teams, and the wider organization.

What’s Next

The Backstage-based platform is not a destination, but a foundation. As AI capabilities evolve and new cloud services emerge, its extensibility gives InfosysIT a way to absorb change without rebuilding the developer experience from scratch.

New service blueprints can be added, governance controls can be embedded, and teams can be onboarded in days rather than months.

For large IT organizations navigating similar challenges, the lesson is straightforward: developer speed and enterprise control do not have to be opposing goals. By putting a cloud native platform between developers and underlying infrastructure complexity—and embedding governance into the paths developers already use—the friction between the two can begin to disappear.

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InfosysIT is the internal IT organization of Infosys Limited, driving platform modernization, cloud governance, and digital workplace experiences for a global workforce of over 300,000.