How S&P Global Built a Self-Service Network Through Automation with Itential

At Itential, we’re striving to ensure our customers are seeing transformational benefits from their network automation initiatives and S&P Global is no different. Recently, our CTO had the opportunity to join Guruprasad Ramamoorthy, VP, Global Head of Network Architecture at S&P Global to discuss in detail the impactful benefits his team was able to achieve by building an automation strategy with Itential, as well as offer advice for other enterprises on their network automation journey.

The Need for Self-Service

Network downtime is not an option for one of the world’s largest financial information and analytics organizations, S&P Global. With customers across 80 countries, network infrastructure spanning physical data centers and multiple cloud providers that service over 60 branch offices, the S&P Global Digital Network Services team is responsible for ensuring that their network is not only available, but consumable. This means creating an “On-Demand Network” that equips internal developers to consume and deliver services faster and enable the business to s쳮d.

To realize their vision, S&P Global needed a solution that could support self-service for their team to deliver products, code, services, and data in a nimble and easily consumable way to keep up with customer requirements. However, reskilling their network engineers into software developers and building it themselves with open-source solutions was not a viable option due to the time and cost associated.

Why S&P Global Selected Itential for Network Automation & Orchestration

With a focus on operational efficiency, S&P Global developed a network automation strategy with the Itential Automation Platform because of it’s key capabilities that support:

• Network & Cloud Infrastructure: Support for both data centers and multi-cloud providers.
• Rapid Integrations: Out-of-the-box integrations to all common enterprise tool sets such as ServiceNow, etc.
• Low-Code Environment: Drag-and-drop interface and self-service capabilities for network engineers.
• Infrastructure as Code: Building pipelines for CI/CD and Git integration.
• Team Automation Strategy Expertise: Team guidance and expertise on use case selection and ease of enablement starting with use cases across configuration and compliance that scales to load balancing, DNS, data centers, and SD-WAN.

Accelerated Time to Deliver Network Services

Itential’s self-service capabilities provide significant improvement in agility and velocity, delivering immediate business impact with results such as reducing their firewall configurations from days to minutes and firewall rule changes from minutes to seconds. This severely accelerated their time to deliver value to customers, ensuring customer retention, expansion and ultimately, satisfaction.

You can download the full case study here and watch the entire discussion here:

Advice to Organization’s Getting Started with Network Automation

Based off the success Guru and his team at S&P Global were able to achieve and the lessons learned, here is some advice he shared for organizations looking to get started on their own network automation projects:

• Start with Impactful Use Cases: Determine the automations that deliver the most value and empower your developers/engineers to create them with an experience that makes it simpler and easier to do their job.
• Be Aggressive in Your Approach to Automation: Make it part of your mainstream goals.
• Shift from Availability to Consumability: Build a strategy to make the network consumable.

No matter where you are in your automation journey, there’s an easy onramp to get started with Itential. Learn more about the ways you can get started with network automation with Itential to start driving transformation benefits in your organization.