How a Global Bank’s Network Team Saved 1,500 Hours Per Upgrade Cycle with Itential

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

GOALS
  • Accelerate Service Delivery
  • Integrate Networking with Change Controls
  • Standardize Automation Across Hybrid Network
USE CASES
  • Regional Isolation
  • Automated Password Rotation
  • Auto-Triage: Event-Triggered Remediation
  • Configuration Checks & Remediation
  • Device OS Upgrades
  • F5 Load Balancer Upgrades
  • Load Balancer Management
  • Inventory Discovery
INTEGRATIONS

Key Results

Executed over 5,000 network processes as orchestrated workflows.

Saved 3,000 hours annually on device OS upgrades.

Onboarded 120+ individuals to the Itential Platform to contribute to automation efforts.

Reduced incidents due to error by 90% across network and infrastructure processes.

Expanded automation participation to non-coders within infrastructure teams.

Challenge: Standardizing Network Automation to Enable Innovation

For network teams at this global bank, automation began like it often does — in an ad-hoc way, driven by individuals, across different teams, using automation to tackle their job.

Automation efforts were fragmented — teams ran scripts manually with no standardized methodology, leading to inefficiencies and operational risks. One or two individuals per team might have the ability to write a script and execute it from their laptop, but this approach made it difficult to scale.

This meant the network was a bottleneck for innovation. To compete and stay ahead in such a fast-paced industry, the bank’s overall strategy is firmly committed toward offering new services, innovating and iterating on products, and deploying new features and applications to attract and retain customers. Coordinating activities across hybrid infrastructure became increasingly important, and the legacy way of managing the network just couldn’t stand up.

We had a series of teams that had maybe a person or two that could automate. They write something on their laptop, store it on their laptop, execute it from their laptop. There’s no real enterprise pattern. That’s one of the reasons we’re pushing so hard internally with Itential — it allows us to do automation for our network community on our enterprise pattern.

Senior Manager, Network Automation DevOps

Solution: Enterprise-Grade Network Automation & Orchestration with Itential

To take network automation efforts to the next level, the company selected Itential for its ability to centralize and standardize ad-hoc scripts across multi-vendor network infrastructure. The platform is designed to scale with your network, allowing teams to orchestrate workflows at scale and integrate seamlessly with distributed environments.

Their first major use case was around a non-cloud regional isolation, where one team had to build a process to store logs and manage a process where one data center would be shut down to test if the other will pick up required traffic.

Using the Itential Platform for the regional isolation project showcased both the platform’s ease of use and its ability to integrate with each of the different device and service vendors required to execute the process — which the team describes as the first time they understood just how far Itential could help them go. Now, they’re building hundreds of workflows, with over 5,000 executed last year and over 120 individuals trained with the Itential Platform.

The company achieved key network and infrastructure goals through Itential’s:

  • Centralized Platform for Network & IT: A single platform capable of building, operating, and maintaining workflows across all network and IT domains.
  • Scalability: The ability to extend automation and orchestration across all domains and sites while maintaining detailed logs and enforcing change controls.
  • End-to-End Orchestration: Seamless integration across their multi-vendor, multi-domain infrastructure, incorporating existing and future Python and Ansible automations written by individual team members.
  • User-Friendly Workflow BuilderDrag-and-drop functionality abstracts network complexity and enables users to quickly create modular, reusable, scalable workflows.
  • Out-of-the-Box Integration Capabilities: Rapidly generate API integrations and leverage pre-built integrations for critical systems like ServiceNow and f5.
  • Self-Service Enablement: The ability to expose network services as self-serve products for internal teams, reducing operational overhead and empowering end users.

Our domain primarily deals with non-cloud devices, but vendors are moving to SaaS or containers. Vendors are containerizing devices allowing us to host them on the cloud. So there’s always going to be coordination between cloud and non-cloud, that hybrid space, and Itential plays a huge, huge role in that.

Senior Manager, Network Automation DevOps

Building a New Operational Model with Itential

By leveraging Itential, the bank has transformed its approach to network automation:

  • Executing Over 5,000 Workflows in First Year: Orchestration has become an integral part of their operations, spanning processes such as auto-triage, password rotations, and configuration consistency.
  • Broad User Adoption: With 120+ users onboarded, teams across the organization are leveraging Itential to automate tasks efficiently.
  • Significant Time Savings: Automating F5 upgrade cycles alone has saved over 1,500 hours per cycle, moving from a six-month manual upgrade cycle to a process that takes minutes and can be executed at any time.
  • Enhanced Performance & High Availability: The company optimized its Itential deployment to support high availability, ensuring automation processes run smoothly at scale.

Itential’s ability to connect hybrid infrastructure is especially key. In this bank’s IT organization, there are many teams managing their own infrastructure domains and leveraging their own tools — driving efficient processes across that landscape requires a platform that easily coordinates both cloud and non-cloud automation.

Business Impact: A Scalable, Future-Forward Automation Program

The company has transitioned from isolated automation efforts to a structured enterprise automation program with Itential. By standardizing workflows and integrating automation and orchestration into day-to-day operations, they have achieved measurable improvements in efficiency, compliance, and operational reliability.

The story so far:

5,000 Processes

Orchestrated in First Year

3,000 Hours

Saved Annually on Device OS Upgrade

90% Incident

Reduction for Orchestrated Processes

Looking ahead to the next year and beyond, this global bank is focused on scaling automation strategically by:

  • Developing Reusable Automation Modules: Standardizing workflows for commonly automated tasks across teams.
  • Enhancing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Strengthening compliance and governance for regulatory needs.
  • Expanding Automation within Secure Network Zones: Ensuring workflows operate seamlessly within restricted environments.

With automation firmly embedded in their operations, they’re poised to take their network automation strategy to the next level, leveraging Itential to drive innovation, compliance, and efficiency at scale.

Standards and best practices: that’s one of the focuses we’re doing in 2025. That’s where reusable modules come in, so we don’t have 15 versions of the same thing. We want to make building automation a more formal process.

Learn Why Infrastructure Teams Choose Itential

Get Started with Itential

Schedule a Custom Demo

Schedule time with our automation experts to explore how our platform can help simplify and accelerate your automation journey.

Meet With Us

Try Now for Free

Try Itential’s Automation Service free for 30 days, full access, no credit card required.

Get Started

See Itential Products in Action

Watch demos of Itential's suite of network automation and orchestration products.

Watch Now