Top FinTech Firm Delivers Self-Serve Automation for SD-WAN Configuration & Compliance With Itential
INDUSTRY
Financial Technology
GOALS
- Tool Consolidation
- Accelerate Delivery of New Network Services
- Mitigate Risk & Ensure Compliance Across Distributed Infrastructure
- Scale to Meet Demand for Customer Activation
USE CASES
- SD-WAN Configuration & Compliance
- Self-Serve Automation
INTEGRATIONS
Key Results
Achieved self-service delivery of SD-WAN configuration via ServiceNow.
Delivered a standardized, compliant SD-WAN solution at scale.
Reduced time to configure a new branch from 83 hours to 4 hours, with monthly FTE savings of 44.98%.
Reduced time to complete compliance audit by from 106 hours to 6 hours, with monthly FTE savings of over 56.88%.
The Need to Shift from Scripts to Self-Service
This large multinational financial technology company needed to scale their managed service offerings for SD-WAN sites to meet increasing customer demand. With many of their banking and financial services customers adopting new SD-WAN solutions, determining how to standardize and scale their managed service offering for the technology in a way that could easily adapt to each customer’s unique infrastructure was a top priority. The company identified three major gaps in their approach to network operations that, once addressed, could help them provide an industry-leading solution for SD-WAN deployments and Day 2 changes.
At first, the company’s networking team had taken a DIY approach to automation. Rising network activity had driven a push toward automation, but the team was still building specific scripts and Ansible Playbooks for single tasks. To orchestrate their automations across larger networking processes, they had invested in Ansible Tower.
However, the team found that Ansible Tower fell short in key areas, and the investment was not worth the cost. With a variety of banking customers each using their own set of tools and systems, integration support had to be a critical piece of offering a managed service to different customers without handcrafted custom work — something that Ansible Tower did not provide. Additionally, config and compliance requirements were high priorities for the team, which Ansible Tower did not address either. The team also faced a skills gap between network engineers who could write Ansible Playbooks and those who could not, meaning scaling their automation efforts depended heavily on costly and continuous expansion of training and development.
The last shortcoming was especially crucial: Ansible Tower lacked support for self-service automation delivery. Exposing SD-WAN automations as services to their customers was identified as a top priority by the team due to the rising volume of Day 2 changes requested by their SD-WAN customers. Faster delivery of changes through automated self-service would enable customers far greater flexibility without requiring additional head count or work hours from the networking team.
After spending significant time trying to build our own solution leveraging Ansible Tower, it was clear we would never achieve the self-service capabilities we needed to meet our increasing customer demand for services.
Manager, Network Team
Why They Chose Itential for Self-Serve SD-WAN Configuration Automation & Orchestration
The Itential Automation Platform is the only solution that met the company’s criteria and enabled the network services team to scale their SD-WAN service delivery to more customers while maintaining compliance.
The company’s network services team achieved their targets for deploying new SD-WAN branches through Itential’s:
- Seamless configuration management for their SD-WAN edge devices to fit any customer infrastructure, across both API and CLI-based assets.
- Single applicationfor efficiently managing device backups, inventory, and config standards to CLI-based physical devices along with API-based SD-WAN and cloud networking services across any vendor and any OS.
- Ability to easily onboard existing Ansible Playbooks and scripts, standardized and secured, to be incorporated into orchestrated workflows for re-use.
- Low-code workflow orchestration that enables everyone on their team to participate in building and deploying end-to-end network services.
- Codeless integration with their IT systems such as Aruba ClearPass, ServiceNow, and a wide array of customer-specific systems.
- Self-service capabilities that enable exposure of orchestrated services to end users.
- Certified Itential ServiceNow Application for seamless self-service delivery to end users within the company’s ServiceNow environment.
We are now faced with more tools and systems that require automation via APIs, and writing our own code and scripts via Python and/or Ansible is not agile enough anymore. The end goal is to have an end-to-end, self-service automation platform that all our engineers can use. Itential is the only solution that can support this.
Network Automation Director
Reducing Complexity & Increasing Efficiency with End-to-End Self-Serve Automation
With Itential, this financial technology company was able to achieve self-service delivery of SD-WAN configuration via their ServiceNow environment. Now, an engineer can simply select the appropriate configuration within ServiceNow to request a service, which triggers orchestrated workflow(s) to deliver that service on-demand. The certified Itential ServiceNow App leverages Itential’s northbound exposure of its API to dynamically discover published services and present them to end users in the organization’s ServiceNow environment. This allows their users to securely request orchestrations as services from within their own ServiceNow environment for cloud-like efficiency.
The company’s network services team is now able to deploy SD-WAN solutions faster and more consistently, reducing time to configure a new branch by over 95.1% and seeing estimated monthly FTE savings of 44.98%. Compliance audits saw a similar jump, with time to complete reduced by 94.3% and monthly FTE savings estimated at 56.88%.
Itential allows them to normalize the infrastructure of all their customers, enabling them to leverage orchestration to deliver standardized, compliant solutions at scale for various technologies that are consistent no matter what systems their customers are using—without a significant reskilling effort.
Building a Self-Serve Platform with Itential
With this use case now under their belt as a proof of concept, the company’s network services team is already looking ahead to next steps. With Itential’s platform, they aim to integrate all other teams into their processes and create a self-service platform that can expose network automations to all systems in use across the IT organization, including CI/CD pipelines. Additionally, as they continue to mature in their automation and orchestration efforts, they will incorporate business workflows more tightly with network process workflows, maximizing the value of their investment.
