Large Financial Institution Accelerates Load Balancer Services by 80% with Itential

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

GOALS

Accelerate Service Delivery
Maximize Engineer Productivity

USE CASES

Load Balancer Management

INTEGRATIONS

Key Results

Saved 80% of time spent performing manual activities for load balancer services.

Increased team capacity to complete load balancer changes by 400%.

Integrated Itential with Cisco NSO and Ansible to avoid repeat work.

Build automations for load balancer changes across all device types.

Eliminated load balancer service request backlog.

Challenge: Manual Network Changes Processes Hinder Digital Transformation

As this large financial institution began executing on their digital transformation strategy, they quickly realized that automating applications and workloads was only part of the solution. Every time an application or workload is deployed or modified, a series of changes is required to network devices and network services. When network services, like load balancing, are not updated to support these new services, they will not operate properly.

Without the ability to automate these network changes, the company faced a backlog of load balancing change requests that was impossible to get through using manual processes. Ultimately, this led to longer and longer delays. Realizing the impact this was having on their business, they were challenged with the requirement to get through these requests faster to start making progress on their backlog. The only way to reduce their backlog, while keeping the same number of team members, was to find a way to automate their manual processes and orchestrate services to reduce the time to complete each request.

We identified load balancer management as a priority use case because our backlog kept growing. The DevOps teams aren’t going to slow down, so we needed a way to match their pace and deliver load balancer services for each new application and workload.

Director of Network Engineering

Solution: Orchestrating Load Balancer Services at Scale with Itential

By leveraging Itential’s platform, this financial institution was able to easily automate and orchestrate their full end-to-end load balancer process and shrink interval time to overcome their backlog. They utilized Itential to integrate with both Ansible and Cisco NSO to quickly make changes to their load balancing infrastructure, regardless of device type. This saved time by allowing them to utilize their current environment and automation assets instead of starting from scratch.

With Itential, they were able to automate and orchestrate load balancing requests at scale through our:

Leverage Existing Automations: Ability to leverage existing automation efforts in Ansible, mitigating the need to rip and replace existing work.
Cisco Integration: Deep integration and support for Cisco NSO solution and all load balancing.
Out-of-the-Box Integration: Codeless integrations to more than 300 systems and the ability to auto-generate integrations for in-house developed systems, to automate the full end-to-end process.
User-Friendly Workflow Builder: Drag-and-drop functionality abstracts network complexity and enables users to quickly create modular, reusable, scalable workflows.
Configuration Consistency & Validation: Easily definable pre-check and post-check processes with the ability to safely rollback any changes.
Self-Service Delivery: Securely enable end user self-service capabilities with RBAC integration and granular controls.

There is no way we would be able to get through our backlog of load balancer requests without the ability to automate our current environment with Itential.

Director of Network Engineering

Increasing Network Team Capacity by Over 400% with Orchestration

By orchestrating the process of updates to the load balancing infrastructure, this financial institution was able to increase their ability to complete changes by 10% during the initial phase of automation rollout. As they have automated more of the end-to-end process and built orchestrated workflows to deliver services in a standardized, streamlined way, they have seen an 80% increase in time savings and a 400% increase in the team’s ability to complete these changes