S&P Global Delivers Same Day Network Services through Self-Service Automation with Itential
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
GOALS
- Shift to a Hybrid Cloud Model
- Enable Same-Day Network Service Delivery
- Accelerate Application Delivery
- Increase Engineer Productivity
USE CASES
- Self-Service Network Automation
- Load Balancer Management
- Firewall Configuration Management
INTEGRATIONS
Key Results
Orchestrated network service workflows across 3 cloud providers, 10 data centers, and multiple network domains.
Reduced network engineers’ manual effort by 80-90%.
Accelerated delivery of key network services like firewall rule changes to accelerate application developers.
Enabled same-day self-service with multi-domain orchestration and integration with infrastructure and security systems.
The Need for Self-Service Network Automation
S&P Global, a global provider of financial information and data analytics needed to accelerate their deployment of new applications and technologies. With 3 cloud providers and 10 data centers that service over 60 offices, their Global Digital Network Services team needed to significantly improve agility of service delivery to better align network services and capabilities with business objectives.
To achieve this goal, they knew they needed to choose the right tools and technologies that could provide the most efficient path (time and cost) to benefits, while enabling the broadest set of use cases to be automated. They needed a solution that would be easy to adopt, mitigating the need to re-skill and re-train their team and could enable domain experts to focus their expertise on solving engineering challenges by offloading repetitive, time-intensive tasks to pre-built or pre-packaged automations or to tools that require minimal or no software development.
With such a large and distributed network, it became very clear that they could not build such a solution themselves through open source options due to the time, effort, and cost which would inhibit them from progressing their business objectives.
The pace of network services was really bogging our team down. We had to find the right tools that helped us bring the network up to speed without hurting security or adding headcount.
Senior Network Architect
Why S&P Global Chose Itential for Network Automation & Orchestration
To drive operational efficiency, S&P Global developed a network automation strategy using the Itential Automation Platform to automate and orchestrate both traditional physical networks as well as emerging cloud network technologies. Itential was the only solution that could enable rapid development of automations, maximize tool/code re-use and modularize common capabilities that can support multiple use cases and applications. With Itential, their NetDevOps team can quickly capture requirements, create the automations to meet the requirements, and deploy the automations to production through our:
- Multi-domain, API-first approach that provides support for hybrid infrastructure, specifically this customer’s data centers and multi-cloud providers.
- No-code development and execution environment that allows non-developers to create automations based on their technology domain expertise.
- Ability to expose functionality via API or automation catalog for self-service capabilities.
- Over 300+ integrations, workflows, and data transformation assets available in the Itential Automation Marketplace, plus the ability to auto-generate integrations for in-house developed systems.
- Ability to integrate with their CI/CD pipelines and Git to support infrastructure as code
- Integrated security model with ability to control access at a granular API-call level, eliminating the need for a separate process for managing access and eliminating the risk of running untested scripts or unmanaged access.
- Robust logging capabilities to enable network architects to collect operational data and report on key metrics to demonstrate the realization of business benefits.
- Team guidance from their Itential account team and expertise on use case selection and ease of enablement.
Almost immediately after working with Itential, we started to realize the true value of delivering services the same day without having to go through a reskilling process. We chose Itential because our environment is truly hybrid and their platform works best with both worlds.
Guruprasad Ramamoorthy, VP, Global Head of Network Architecture, Engineering & Operations
Accelerated Time to Deliver Network Services Through Automation
With Itential, the S&P Global Network Services team has reduced manual effort by 80-90% and reduced completion times to hours instead of days. By enabling self-service automation for their network engineers, they have realized such results as reducing their firewall configurations from days to minutes and firewall rule changes from minutes to seconds. With Itential, the S&P Global network team can automate a higher level of activities more quickly, accelerating their time to deliver value to customers, ensuring customer retention, expansion and ultimately, satisfaction.
