Red Hat Extends Mission-Critical Automation for Customers Across the Hybrid Cloud

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today highlighted how organizations across the globe are using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help smooth cloud-native operations, establish a wide-ranging automation culture and respond more quickly to potentially disastrous challenges.

Red Hat continues to make Ansible Automation Platform the mission-critical automation solution for operating complex hybrid clouds, from the datacenter to multiple public clouds to the edge, along with AI applications at scale. These customers and many others are using Ansible Automation Platform to deliver new and innovative solutions to meet today’s IT challenges while preparing for technology needs yet to come, like using AI as a natural progression of IT automation. These implementations include:

City and County of Denver manages and coordinates public services for residents and visitors of one of America’s most livable cities, with the population growing 20% in just the last decade. This work became even more important—and more challenging—when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a rapid, long-term shift to remote work. To support more than 15,000 employees working from home, the government sought to adapt its new collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams. By automating provisioning, scaling tasks, application deployments, creating playbooks and configuration management with Ansible Automation Platform, Denver supported 514% growth in Teams use. They also quickly launched a digital emergency operations center (EOC) with 75% completion over a single weekend early in the pandemic, providing a central facility for government leaders to strategically enact emergency management and policies. Now, Denver can react more quickly to potential disasters and establish future EOCs in just 15 minutes with the right people and documents ready.

After implementing an automation Center of Excellence and socializing the automation program, Denver continues to find new use cases, promote success and gather metrics to support change. The city is sharing details of its IT automation success with other cities in Colorado to set the standard in emergency management efforts.

At MAPFRE, a global insurance company headquartered in Madrid, customers need absolute confidence that when they have a question, issue or claim, they can quickly and easily receive the needed service. When MAPFRE created its cloud strategy, the company quickly realized the need for automation to achieve its goals, such as getting to new markets faster, optimizing infrastructure costs, reducing carbon footprint and maintaining resilience and security. Once MAPFRE onboarded Ansible Automation Platform, the company saw significant results that mattered for the business: 

• Time to market saw a 55% lead time reduction and 85% error-rate reduction with 4,700 developer hours saved.
• Cost and sustainability enhancements by automatically shutting down PRE environments, eradicating unused environments after 30 days and deleting orphaned resources.
• Enhanced resilience by automating remediations and disaster recovery environments and the disconnection of environments at risk.

With these successes, automation at MAPFRE has grown from an experiment into mission-critical. Next, it plans to use Ansible Automation Platform to minimize issues caused by human error, which typically account for over 50% of incidents.

Navy Federal Credit Union, the world's largest credit union with more than 13 million members and $171 billion in assets, is a leader in an ever-evolving industry, where the use of technology is key to serving US veterans, retired service members, active duty members in all branches of the armed forces and their families. The institution enlisted Ansible Automation Platform for its functionality and ease of use. By fostering a culture of openness, transparency and collaboration, Navy Federal met its technological and cultural goals by closing automation adoption gaps. Provisioning time to value dropped from 11 days down to 1 day, and the credit union improved consistency across teams and adopted an automation community of practice. Ansible Automation Platform became an accelerator of cultural change: Teams who were speaking different programming languages could now share code, ideas and workflows in a common format.

As Navy Federal expands usage across all infrastructure and targets AI implementation for the future, it plans to use Ansible Automation Platform as the foundation with transparency, innovation and flexibility.

TD Bank offers a full range of financial products and services to over 27.5 million customers worldwide. Through their network transformation roadmap, the bank sought to lead with an automation-first mindset at the center of their platform delivery capabilities – ranging from scalability of software upgrades, configuration management and deployment, as well as standing up new products. The internal evolution of their automation capabilities drove forward the reduction of repetitive tasks for engineering teams alongside bringing new standardization to their deployments.  

First, TD Bank created a strategic architecture for building up the Ansible environment, writing purpose-built playbooks for certain key tasks and helping engineers onboard to a new platform. The Network Services team shifted to an automation-first mindset with the support of leadership and new team members with automation backgrounds. Integrating with third-party vendors, TD Bank automated the standardization of over 10,000 network devices against new-state standards – improving software deployment and compliance, as well as configuration management. The bank also has been successful in migrating and deploying entire platforms using API integration to speed up the delivery of projects in a shorter time frame.

Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest

Join the Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest keynotes to hear the latest from Red Hat executives, customers and partners:

• The cloud is hybrid. So is AI. — Tuesday, May 7, 8-10 a.m. MDT (YouTube, LinkedIn)
• The tipping point: adopting a mission-critical automation mindset. — Tuesday, May 7, 10:30-11:15 a.m. MDT (YouTube, LinkedIn)
• Optimizing IT for the AI era. — Wednesday, May 8, 8:30-9:30 a.m. MDT (YouTube, LinkedIn)
• Automation, AI, and the next enterprise IT revolution. — Wednesday, May 8, 10-10:45 a.m. MDT. (YouTube, LinkedIn) Hear more about MAPFRE and Navy Federal Credit Union’s success.

Supporting Quotes

Sathish Balakrishnan, vice president and general manager, Ansible, Red Hat

“Automation is critical to help drive and sustain innovation with our customers, no matter the use case or region and whether they adopt the platform early or are automation experts tapping Ansible to support new AI possibilities. We’re pleased to have Ansible Automation Platform serve as the linchpin for these technology efforts, providing the mission-critical element of any effective modern IT strategy.”

Sean Greer, director of IT Service Delivery, City and County of Denver

“During a very challenging, fast-moving situation, automation has helped create standard, repeatable processes. We can’t predict the future, but we know we will face challenges related to hiring and resource availability. Being able to automate processes will be fundamental to supporting new, digital ways of working to solve these challenges.”

Craig Mitchell, manager of Site Reliability Engineering, Navy Federal Credit Union

“No matter how great a tool or the strategy behind it is, successful adoption of a major change isn’t going to be sustainable without the right culture in place. We initially chose Ansible Automation Platform because of its accessibility, ease of use and our belief in the open source ethos behind the project. What transpired was that Ansible Automation Platform became an accelerator of cultural change and we won big. We built a culture that is ready — and eager — to take on whatever is coming next.”

Drew Yates, Global Head – Network Service Delivery, TD Bank

“Running networks at scale involves multiple vendors, topologies and a constant rate of change. Choosing the right complement of tools to help manage these environments can be equally as challenging. We're pleased that we've created an ecosystem with Ansible Automation Platform that is purpose built to address TD’s evolving needs while also cultivating a new network development mindset within our teams. This enablement has allowed our teams to move faster and enrich our internal customer's experience with the network organization - both through request implementation and currency tasks across our estate, delivering a more performant network to our developers and application owners."