How a Canadian Credit Union Modernized Provisioning with Ansible Automation

Background

MOBIA’s client, a Western Canadian credit union, sought to modernize its provisioning process for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) machines. With budgets tightening in the ultra-competitive financial service (FIS) landscape, enterprises must innovate, not just when it comes to products and services, but also in the infrastructure that supports them. As an existing Red Hat customer, this Financial Services (FIS) client needed a better, faster, and more consistent way to provision machines, and to ensure they were hardened and secure. 

Objectives

Modernize and streamline provisioning

Ensure consistency in hardware provisioning

Improve security of provisioned devices

Solution

While this leading financial services enterprise already used Ansible engine to power virtual machine deployment and change management of their RHEL endpoint, it hadn’t been successful at scaling the solution across the organization and reusing code across teams. However, the power of Ansible Automation Platform lies in that it's a true enterpise-ready, multi-tenant platform. By leveraging AAP’s modular and platform services approach, organizations can support any automation use-case and centralize it across a shared platform. With the flexibility to support hybrid environment automation, AAP scales as requirements within an organization evolve. 

With MOBIA’s help, this FIS client implemented AAP to deploy RHEL machines on-prem in VMware and in the cloud on AWS. This enabled the enterprise to streamline its provisioning process, reduce manual intervention, and enhance overall operational efficiency. With Red Hat Satellite compute profiles, the client realized the power of integrating and building a workflow around their native Red Hat tooling and solutions. Seamlessly complementing each other, AAP and Satellite were used for provisioning and ongoing management. This solution offered four key benefits for the client: 

‍

1. Standardization and consistency

Leveraging this new solution, the client could standardize provisioning across virtual machines and hardware, sharing a common request and deployment lifecycle workflow. This includes patching and management with Red Hat Satellite, which provides the enterprise with a centralized dashboard and reporting engine for their entire RHEL deployment. 

With AAP’s automation capabilities, all deployments and configurations are executed consistently though declarative, as-code state. Misconfigurations or changes are reverted. 

‍

2. Reduced provisioning time

With AAP, the client’s operations team has been empowered to deploy machines quickly and with consistent configurations. This represents a significant strategic benefit, since it allows the client’s team to respond to changing demands in the market by focusing their efforts on launching new services and scaling their operations. 

‍

3. Enhanced security

As the threat landscape evolves, enhancing security calls for consistency and continuous centralized monitoring. With this new solution, the financial services enterprise can secure virtual machines and managed hardware assets across the organization. Virtual machines are hardened and configured consistently through automation and role-based access control (RBAC) is integrated with the organization's identity provider to secure managed devices. 

With Red Hat Insights, the security team can monitor vulnerabilities using a centralized dashboard. 

‍

4. Cost visibility

Along with streamlined processes, cost visibility is a strategic benefit that our client realized with this implementation. With a streamlined workflow and efficient resource utilization, the costs of provisioning and managing virtual and hardware assets became consistent and predictable, allowing the client to maximize its ROI on infrastructure investments. In addition, reporting and automation analytics put real-time cost insights at the client’s fingertips. 

‍