Global energy company speeds up innovation with automation platform

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Project Summary.

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The challenge.

The company was looking to align IT capabilities with its broader mission to drive sustainability and innovation

It therefore refined its cloud strategy to focus 5 pillars that would enable greater flexibility and collaboration:

Security – Reducing risks from technical debt and optimising IT operational costs

Speed – Accelerating business development through cross-functional collaboration in IT and digital solutions

Efficiency – Ensuring IT scalability and sustainability

Data – Driving business performance improvements through insights and automation

People – Developing the right competencies

Automation was a key element in achieving this strategic vision

Although the Cloud Centre of Excellence had introduced best practices and governance, cloud growth was outpacing operational capacity. IT and digital solution teams were hampered by manual and time-consuming provisioning processes involving multiple stakeholders.

This was contributing to:

Pressure to increase quality of service

Difficulty managing budgets

Slower-than-optimal development cycles

Security risks

Unclear documentation for compliance

How do you manage these increasing demands on IT while controlling costs and boosting innovation efficiency? Automation was key. But how to achieve it amid a complex organisation and IT estate?

That’s where we came in.

The solution.

We took a 3-pronged approach to introducing automation that would free up IT capacity, empower digital solution teams and enable integration with cloud managed services.

Cloud catalogue

We started by introducing an ITSM service catalogue to streamline requests and deployments. This provided the foundation for enabling self-service. It also integrated with ServiceNow to enhance collaboration with managed services.

Automation platform

This orchestrates all platform services, serving as a unified platform for gathering, integrating and refining automation assets.

Zero-touch process for cloud service requests

With the catalogue and platform in place, we introduced end-to-end automation that enables self-service from request to managed services provisioning (including approvals, governance and the transition to operations).

The results.

Innovation speed

Cloud service requests no longer take days or require cumbersome coordination efforts. For example, the time it takes to provision virtual machines was reduced from 5 days to just 30 minutes.

Cost savings

The company saw the financial benefits from Day 1 of implementation. For just 2 request categories, it is estimated to save more than €50,000 per month.

Operational efficiency

The cloud services catalogue streamlines the process of requesting and managing new cloud services. It connects with managed services, with an increasing number of catalogue items fully automated.

Because code-based deployments are preferred, manual input is only needed for rare, critical exceptions, like when data integrity is at risk. Code duplication is avoided – templates and pipelines are written once and maintained collectively, ensuring cost-effectiveness and scalability.

Security and compliance

The well-documented self-service processes streamline compliance, with the automation facilitating adherence to best practices and governance. Automation is reducing risks from human error and contributing to more efficient managed security processes.