Podcasts

Packet Pushers: From Automation to Orchestration for a FinTech Network

Ethan Banks

Packet Pushers

Chris Wade

Co-Founder & CTO

Michael Wynston

Fiserv

Andrew Conry-Murray

Packet Pushers

Key Points

- The Pivotal Role of Automation in Fintech: How automation is transforming the FinTech sector by improving efficiency, reliability, and scalability in financial transactions.
- Overcoming Automation Challenges: Fiserv’s early hurdles in network automation, key lessons lea
  ed, and how they shaped their strategy.
- From Task Automation to Orchestration: How Fiserv evolved from simple task-based automation to full-scale workflow orchestration with Itential.
- Scalability & Efficiency in Finance: The critical need for scalable and efficient automation to support global financial operations.
- Standardization & Best Practices: How adopting automation standards and best practices enhances network reliability and performance.
- Empowering Engineers with Low-Code & No-Code: The impact of low-code/no-code platforms in enabling network engineers to accelerate automation efforts.
- Self-Service & Engineering Efficiency: How self-service automation capabilities are driving greater productivity for network teams.
- Business Outcomes of Automation: The direct impact of automation on cost reduction, revenue growth, and risk mitigation in financial services.

Building A Scalable System

Building a practice around network automation didn’t come all at once for Fiserv, one of the largest FinTech companies in the world.

From training engineers to learn Ansible and Python, to attempting to centralize automation expertise – they’ve made consistent progress, but they’ve also seen their fair share of challenges to get functioning automation off the ground. After a successful start, they realized when you get into network automation at scale, it’s more than just writing a simple script that replaces something you used to do by hand. When you’re trying to build a scalable system, the focus shifts.

Engineers don’t need a lot of help pushing config. Where automation really makes an impact is the surrounding work: maintaining standards, interacting with systems of record, ensuring processes are followed and incidents don’t occur.

That led to a need to scale automation. Insert orchestration: a solution for coordinating multiple automations across their distributed, multi-vendor environment to standardize and productize the way they deliver network services. With Itential, they’ve been able to lower the barrier to entry for automation and accelerate the way they deliver services, without compromising on quality.

“When you look at building network automation at scale, what we’re looking for is the ability to scale across all the different platforms that we have. We’re looking for scale to move across and into all of the systems that feed into the information that’s necessary to be successful in our automation jou ey.”

Michael Wynston, Director of Network Architecture & Automation at Fiserv

How Itential Helps You Scale from Automation Orchestration

Itential’s orchestration and automation products are designed to reinforce best practices. Like Michael says in the podcast, “Network engineering is not an art. It should be a standard.”

With integration capabilities for your systems of record and IT stack, and the ability to orchestrate end-to-end processes in a modular, reusable way, Itential minimizes the opportunities for human error while providing a framework that helps you scale.

Explore the Itential Platform →

Itential will make us more money by increasing our velocity to deliver infrastructure. It will save us money, because to deliver more, I won’t need any significant increase in headcount. And it keeps me off the front page by allowing me to ensure infrastructure is consistently secured everywhere.

Michael Wynston

Director of Network Architecture & Automation at Fiserv