Global Manufacturing Company Achieves Zero Trust Networking by Orchestrating IT Service Requests with Itential
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing
GOALS
- Maximize Network Engineer Productivity
- Accelerate Service Delivery
- Enable Zero-Trust Network Access
USE CASES
- Software Deployment
- Zero-Trust Networking
INTEGRATIONS
Key Results
Saved 834 manual hours per year deploying software to new employees and sites.
Time-to-complete from software request to secure deployment reduced from days to minutes.
Automated fulfillment of 1670 ServiceNow tickets in one year.
Integrated with security solutions to enforce zero-trust access for all automated service requests.
The Need to Orchestrate IT Service Requests
In today’s zero trust networks, employee onboarding and offboarding processes must be done quickly and securely to maintain established security requirements.
This global manufacturing company, with a growing workforce and numerous manufacturing facilities worldwide, found that a reliance on scattered pockets of automation scripts to provision new systems posed a significant scalability challenge. Their network services team was flooded with over 1600 ServiceNow ticket requests a year to support software deployments, creating an impossible backlog without end-to-end orchestration.
The company heavily relied on subject matter expertise across various technologies, including Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and InfoBlox, for tasks like onboarding/offboarding and software deployment. With the combination of an influx of requests and the heavy reliance on these manual processes from specialized people, they were unable to meet the required SLAs.
The company determined that their current manual processes fell short in terms of speed, efficiency, and reducing human error. Furthermore, continuing to write more scripts to automate individual tasks proved difficult to scale. To combat this, they sought a platform that could automate and orchestrate their processes end-to-end, enabling them to manage and deliver network services in a manner that enables their zero trust networking goals.
It was an impossible task to keep up with the network change requests coming in. Our team knew we had to find a new way to scale – and fast.
Network Engineer
Why They Chose Itential to Orchestrate Software Deployments
The Itential Automation Platform is the only SaaS solution that could orchestrate the entire software deployment process end-to-end without requiring engineers to learn special skills. Adopting Itential enabled the company’s network services team to deliver a machine to a user, such as a new employee, with all required software at the end user’s click of a button. In addition, the SaaS deployment model has made this process easily scalable for their changing and evolving infrastructure. The network services team is now able to fulfill service requests much more quickly while reducing their reliance on specialized skillsets, taking what had previously been a slow manual process and turning it into a scalable, automated one.
The company achieved their targets with Itential’s:
- Pre-Built Integrations to their key systems such as ServiceNow, InfoBlox and Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) as well as the ability to autogenerate integrationsfor additional bespoke systems.
- Low-code workflow canvasfor building end-to-end orchestrations using reusable drag-and-drop assets.
- Ability to onboard existing script-based automations with Itential’s Automation Gateway.
- Capabilities for building modular automation libraries that become reusable assets leveraged across other automation uses cases and teams.
- SaaS solutionthat provides ease of use, deployment, and management.
We would have never been able achieve zero trust networking without the help of Itential. Their platform’s robust and flexible integration capabilities are what set them apart, providing our team with the tools they need to orchestrate entire processes in our own ecosystem.
Senior Network Director
Real-World Results of End-to-End Orchestration
The company’s network services team saved over 834 total hours annually by automating this software deployment use case alone. Eliminating time-consuming, repetitive manual intervention from over 1600 requests in a single year has freed up the IT team for more advanced IT management activities and has sped up the end-to-end turnaround time from a software service catalog request in ServiceNow to a fully provisioned, ready-to-go employee device.
The automated process involves integrations with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). The team built PowerShell scripts to automate parts of the process, which were incorporated into the larger workflow via the Itential Automation Gateway, our tool for onboarding and managing script and CLI automation assets. And to maximize the automation’s reach, the company’s IT employees can now request software deployments through ServiceNow, experiencing cloud-like self-service due to Itential’s API integration capabilities.
Key achievements:
- Provided the ability for manufacturing plant IT support personnel to respond much more quickly to new operational technology requirements.
- Delivered a better user experience for the IT end users.
- Saved significant manual time by orchestrating all steps of the software deployment process.
- Eliminated manual intervention required to fulfill requests end-to-end.
- Reduced wait time between service request and service delivery.
- Mitigated compliance and security threats.
- Delivered self-service capabilities for requesting new software deployments.
Looking Ahead
With this use case under their belt, the company’s network services team is now looking ahead to more ways they can leverage Itential’s SaaS-based network automation capabilities.
One of their top priorities is tackling tickets, helping to ease the load on the ServiceNow IT team due to network-related service catalog requests. Itential’s certified ServiceNow Application enables deep, powerful integration between Itential network automations and a ServiceNow IT ecosystem and provides the ability for IT end users to request Itential network automations as services directly from a ServiceNow portal. The team plans to leverage the app and other Itential integrations to tackle more ServiceNow-related use cases next.
Afterward, they’ve indicated their priorities lie in creating Golden Configurations to manage device configurations across a complex, distributed, hybrid network environment, which reduces risk and helps maintain consistency as the company continues to scale and as networking technology continues to evolve.
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