Leading Digital Payments Provider Eliminates Manual Change Processes Across Hybrid Cloud Networks through Self-Service Automation with Itential
INDUSTRY
Banking & Financial Services
GOALS
- Accelerate Time to Provision Network Services
- Integrate Networking with Change Management
- Maximize Engineer Productivity
- Ensure Quality & Mitigate Network Security Risk
USE CASES
- Configuration Management
- Firewall Updates
- Self-Service Networking
- Software Upgrades
- Load Balancer Management
INTEGRATIONS
Key Results
Enabled engineers without coding expertise to leverage automation.
Integrated networking with ServiceNow change management processes.
Standardized Golden Configuration across multi-vendor, multi-domain CLI and API devices and services.
Reduced time to complete routine network changes by 90%.
Reduced time to update load balancer configuration by 80%.
Reduced time to update firewall configuration by 50%.
Network Vulnerabilities from Manual Processes & Siloed Scripts
Faced with network security vulnerabilities due to manual network change processes and scattered silos of scripts, this leading digital payments company needed to find a scalable solution for automating their network operations. With such a large and distributed network as well as efforts focused on shifting workloads to the cloud, it became very clear that their efforts with scripts and CLI automation could not scale to meet the complexity of their network due to the time, effort, and cost associated.
Even with their existing investment in Ansible and Terraform scripts to execute changes, they struggled to encourage automation adoption and could not scale their efforts to automate use cases quickly enough. Addressing security vulnerabilities would mean finding the right set of tools to accelerate automation and increase adoption across the team.
Manual network changes just left us falling further and further behind, and writing scripts alone wasn’t doing enough — especially with how large and distributed our network infrastructure is.
Network Engineer
Why They Chose Itential for Network Automation & Orchestration
This digital payments company needed a way to mitigate the need to re-skill and re-train their team so that domain experts could focus their expertise on solving engineering challenges by offloading repetitive, time consuming tasks.
Itential is the only solution that could enable rapid development of automations with modularized common capabilities that can support multiple use cases and applications, as well as providing a no-code, drag-and-drop workflow canvas to make building orchestration workflows as easy as possible. In addition, Itential provided them with pre-built workflow components that did not require custom code to be integrated with their existing scripts. With Itential, their network team can quickly capture requirements, create workflows to meet the requirements, and deploy the orchestrated services to production through our:
- Multi-domain and multi-vendor flexibility that provides support for hybrid infrastructure, specifically this customer’s data centers, network security, and network services.
- Ability to leverage existing automation effortsin Ansible and Terraform, mitigating the need to rip-and-replace existing work.
- Codeless integrations for seamlessly connecting IT systems across ITSM, IPAM, DNS, Sources of Truth, notifications and more with network technologies.
- Single application for efficiently managing device backups, inventory, and config standards to CLI-based physical devices along with API-based cloud networking services across any vendor and any OS.
- Flexible and reusable Golden Configuration Templates for easily managing any device and service across their entire network, ensuring they are never out of compliance.
- Ability to expand automation participation by mitigating the skills gap with our form-driven automation and low-code development environment.
- Capabilities that can expose functionality via API, applications such as ServiceNow or our automation catalog for self-service capabilities, enabling same-day delivery of network services.
- SaaS solution that provides ease of use, deployment, and management.
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.
Lead Network Engineer
Automation & Orchestration Use Cases Across Multi-Domain, Multi-Vendor Network
By leveraging the Itential Automation Platform, their team was able to orchestrate the following use cases in the first few months, with many more to follow:
- 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.
Mitigated Silos & Reduced Time to Deliver New Services with Automation & Orchestration
With Itential’s orchestration capabilities and the ability to seamlessly onboard their existing CLI automations, this digital payments company has reduced time to market through self-service capabilities for software upgrades and firewall configuration management as well as reduced manual efforts for onboarding new devices and accelerated configuration change process. With our flexible integration approach, their team can now kick off workflows from ServiceNow for full ticket to ticket automation.
In addition, they have also increased team collaboration to break down a siloed approach to network management, reducing the technology gap with Itential’s easy-to-use automation and orchestration capabilities.
Learn Why Infrastructure Teams Choose Itential
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