Q: What do you do when new work comes in faster than you can complete it?
A: What humans have always done when we need to level up our capabilities — start using new tools!
Sound familiar? That’s exactly the situation we hear about from the network teams we talk to everyday, and it’s the situation that helps teams realize it’s time for a centralized orchestration platform like Itential.
Recently, we partnered with the network team at a large global digital payments company to help them move faster and do more while standardizing and streamlining their approach. The team faced high volumes (and increasing!) of network service requests across an increasingly complex infrastructure landscape, leading to an average time to complete of over a week. This meant slower operations across the business, plus security vulnerabilities whenever firewall rules or software upgrades were delayed.
Today, with Itential, each network engineer on the team is empowered to make a big impact. Whether it’s by building out high-code automation assets to use in workflows, coordinating low-code orchestrated workflows across multiple network domains, or quickly and easily managing configurations across all kinds of different devices, services, and systems, the team can do more with less effort and can keep up with their expanding network going forward.
Their Challenge: Network Backlogs & Automation That Wouldn’t Scale
Before adopting Itential, the team’s approach involved a combination of manual operations and pockets of DIY automation (primarily Ansible and Terraform). They found initial success with a core of highly skilled engineers building these automations, but they continued to struggle to expand automation adoption. And even with some automation in the mix, they weren’t able to move as quickly as the business demanded.
Something had to change — in today’s world, business relies on networks more than ever. The team couldn’t keep up with network service requests, which meant significant delays for load balancer configuration changes and firewall configuration changes. On top of this, requests were becoming more complex, with developers requiring customized, multi-domain services to enable continued innovation. Large-scale cloud migration initiatives and the growing complexity of their multi-domain network infrastructure would only make keeping up with service requests more difficult.
As one network engineer told the Itential team, “manual changes just left us falling further and further behind, and writing scripts alone wasn’t doing enough.”
Adopting Itential to Accelerate Automation Through Orchestration
The company’s search for a scalable solution to their network infrastructure led them to Itential. Our platform beat out the competition by directly addressing three major priorities:
- Automating and orchestrating across different domains and systems without slowing down.
- Continuing to maximize the team’s expertise with Ansible and Terraform, allowing them to keep moving forward, avoid repeat work, and drive even greater value out of their automation skills.
- Providing a modular, low-code solution to address skills gaps, increasing automation adoption for team members without Ansible or Terraform expertise.
In addition, the platform provided them with advanced, vendor-agnostic configuration management capabilities, the ability to integrate network engineering directly with their ServiceNow change management processes, and a streamlined, secure way to enable users like security and operations to leverage automations without hands on keyboard from the network team.
We worked with them to get initial high-priority use cases automated and orchestrated ASAP, cutting down time to complete firewall and load balancer service requests by 50% and 80% respectively. And it’s not just about speed — with Itential’s orchestration capabilities, they’ve been able to add critical steps like pre-checks, post-checks, inventory queries, and change management activities to their workflows.
It’s about meeting the team where they are.
They have a strong core of high-code automation engineers, and our platform allows them to focus on building automations that can then be incorporated into workflows that extend their impact.
They need to move fast, and our platform allows more engineers to automate and orchestrate with a low-code workflow builder, provides pre-built assets through Automation Marketplace to help teams get off the ground faster, and minimizes manual inputs required from the network team once a use case has been orchestrated.
They have a large, complex infrastructure stack, and our platform can integrate with all of it due to its API-first integration method and the fact that using JSON allows us to avoid prescribing any particular data model.
One of the network engineering team leads put it best when asked about their experience:
“We were impressed with how quickly we were able to get our team up and running with Itential. Within 24 hours we had all of our API specs connected and working so we could start building automations immediately.”
The Team’s Current & Future Success
The new operational model proved to be transformative. Within just the first few months, the team was able to orchestrate and accelerate all of the following use cases:
- Self-Service Network Change Management – Integrated with ServiceNow for automating the opening of a change request ticket, updating the ticket at every stage of the network change process, and closing the ticket when it is complete.
- Configuration Management – End-to-end configuration management processes for firewalls (Palo Alto, Cisco ASA, & Panorama) and network devices (Cisco NXOS), including pre- and post-checks built by network engineers and turned into reusable assets.
- Golden Configuration Standardization – Implemented Golden Configuration standardization across multi-vendor, multi-domain network CLI and API services.
- Software Upgrades – End-to-end software upgrades across Cisco NXOS devices, including robust pre-and post-checks.
- Load Balancer Configuration & Management – End-to-end orchestrated process for AVI load balancer changes.
Itential enabled this global digital payments company to evolve from limited pockets of DIY automation to a holistic, multi-domain, future-proof orchestration strategy that could scale with their needs — without losing any of the benefits of their custom-built automation. They’ve been able to eliminate silos and ensure everyone on the team can participate in building automation and orchestration, allowing them to move faster, eliminate backlogs, and gain confidence they’ll be able to handle the constantly increasing volume of service requests coming from applications, developers, security, and operations.
Is your network team facing never-ending service request backlogs? Are you looking for ways to expand automation participation and ensure you can deliver services rapidly across all network domains and cloud environments? Are you interested in doing more with less effort?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, give Itential a try today — or watch some demos to get a deeper look at how our platform works! You can also see a more detailed list of tools, integrations, use cases, and results for this customer here.
Tyler Lochan
Technical Content Specialist ‐ Itential
Tyler Lochan is a Technical Content Specialist at Itential. Tyler is a Georgia Tech grad who began his career as a technology consultant in financial services. He has a passion for bringing his technical expertise together with writing, and he focuses on creating content to support our customers as they navigate their network automation journeys.
