From the abacus to the adding machine to the first spreadsheet application, technology and accounting have always been intertwined. The EY organization (EY), one of the largest professional services organizations across the globe, has always embraced technology as a means to help accelerate business growth and customer impact. The organization has long built software internally to address its unique challenges, and has built consultancy services to share the organization’s solutions and experience with its clients.

To stay on the leading  edge of technology, EY, a long-time Microsoft  collaborator, integrated its Microsoft Azure Pipelines installation with GitHub, tapping into the power of GitHub’s cohesive development platform to secure code, accelerate development, and increase developer happiness. The organization is migrating repositories from Azure DevOps to GitHub Enterprise, while still relying on Azure DevOps for project management and CI/CD. "GitHub is more than just a place to store code, it’s a full-featured platform where we can manage the entire developer workflow," says Developer Tools Lead at EY Technology James Zabinski.

GitHub is more than just a place to store code, it’s a full-featured platform where we can manage the entire developer workflow.

GitHub Advanced Security was a major motivation for the migration, as it provided immediate value, with very little effort. "Other security tools only run when you tell them to," Zabinski explained. "GitHub Advanced Security is always running, giving you the help you need as you code, so that the security review process is accelerated." Push protection, for example, keeps developers from committing secrets, ensuring they never find their way into a codebase, let alone production.

Zabinski says that by the time the reviews happen, most vulnerabilities have already been remediated or prevented. "GitHub enabled us to shift left," he says. "Security is now just a part of developers’ daily life, as it should be."

EY began using GitHub Copilot with a pilot program of around 150 developers. Within a matter of weeks, those developers had already committed 1.2 million lines of code generated by the AI pair programmer. "There are lots of things that developers don't like to do, like writing unit tests," Zabinski says. "GitHub Copilot makes that easier, while helping them do the thing they like to, writing code, faster. Those 1.2 million lines of code saved us a lot of time."

EY has now rolled out GitHub Copilot to all its 2,000 developers. "GitHub Copilot is turbocharging developer workflows,” says Mark Luquire, director and global head of platform adoption. "It's clear embedding generative AI across developer environments will transform how organizations deliver and drive value and ultimately achieve more.”

GitHub Copilot is turbocharging developer workflows. It's clear embedding generative AI across developer environments will transform how organizations deliver and drive value and ultimately achieve more.

GitHub Codespaces also yielded immediate dividends. Before, new hires had to spend days or weeks setting up their environments and installing dependencies before they could become productive team members. Codespaces provides instantly ready developer environments, which accelerates the time to productivity.

Zabinski says GitHub has also helped with recruitment and job satisfaction. “It upped our ‘cool factor,’” he says. “It's a platform that was built by developers for developers, so it's what developers naturally want to use.”

Unifying the company’s developers on GitHub is increasing collaboration and helping to cultivate an innersource culture. "We've tried many times with many different platforms to drive reuse," Zabinski says. “GitHub is the platform that drives open source in the world. That’s great for creating the sort of environment we want at EY."

Thanks to the tight integration between Azure DevOps and GitHub, the EY organization was able to build automations to facilitate collaboration and help ensure a seamless developer experience. EY still uses Azure DevOps Boards for project management and handles most of its CI/CD with Azure DevOps Pipelines. Zabinski says the integration EY built between Azure DevOps and GitHub is seamless. For example, when developers migrate a repository from Azure DevOps, all their Azure pipelines are automatically remapped to GitHub, with no need for users to do anything. Likewise, when a developer creates new GitHub repositories, they can automatically link them to associated Azure DevOps projects. User accounts are also created automatically, with the same permissions, in both locations, reducing the administrative overhead of setting up new accounts and access settings. Many of these automations were created with GitHub Actions.

GitHub brings so much to the table that we couldn’t do before. Combining Azure DevOps with GitHub keeps us on the cutting edge of innovation without sacrificing dependability.

GitHub and Azure DevOps help the EY organization to take advantage of the best of each, creating a unified platform that’s more than the sum of its parts. “GitHub brings so much to the table that we couldn’t do before,” Zabinski says. “Combining Azure DevOps with GitHub keeps us on the cutting edge of innovation without sacrificing dependability.”