Recently Michael Lebiedzinski, AVP Cloud Engineering at Guardian Life Insurance, filled us in on all the work he and his team are doing in their environment. VMware cloud management tools have allowed Guardian to be more efficient with their large IT estate while also delivering higher quality IT services. As Guardian brings on new VMware tools, such as Log Insight, VSAN and VMware NSX they are finding even more possibilities to better service their business partners.
Who is the customer
Guardian Life Insurance is one of the leading mutual life insurance companies with world-wide reach. With over a 150-year history, Guardian has not only stayed relevant but also prospered with a client first mentality and as they have adopted new and upcoming technologies to be more efficient.
Motivations
In an effort to automate IT, Guardian’s business goals continue to leverage technology to deliver products and services more efficiently. The IT management team took on a mandate to evaluate everything that was being done in their IT environments and to look for ways to innovate. The team found that the process to deliver services to customers (mainly application developers and test engineers) was taking too long. Additionally, there was often a mismatch between what IT was delivering and what the customers’ expectations were.
Solution
Guardian is taking a 2-phase approach: phase one primarily focuses on Infrastructure as a Service and Phase two is aligned with platform and application services. VMware vRealize Automation has allowed Michael and his team at Guardian to accomplish these goals and all within some aggressive timelines. The team has tailored the solution to their specific needs, for example:
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ServiceNow® Integration – with a substantial investment in ServiceNow® the Guardian team wanted to leverage this familiar tool with vRealize Automation. When requesting new virtual machines, all requests go through ServiceNow® and vRealize Automation is what executes all of these requests in the background.
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IT Automation – rather than automating an entire process all at once, the team at Guardian has broken up their processes into smaller tasks levering the vRealize Automation This has allowed them to rollback small changes if something fails, rather than start from scratch.
Results
Michael and his team are serving close to 800 developers that are much more efficient with their time and resources. A recent example is a developer who ordered 7 servers and received all of them complete and deployed in 7 hours. Infrastructure approvals used to take 4 business days, now they are complete in 1.1 days on average. Fulfilment (approvals to production ready) took 8 business days plus the potential for 3-6 tickets can now be done in 123 minutes. A Linux server takes 27 minutes and a Windows server takes 44 minutes. This is just the start for Guardian as they continue to gain more agility and realize more efficiencies in their IT organization.
Next Steps
Building on the success that Guardian has already accomplished, they are implementing vRealize Log Insight and vSAN. vRealize Log Insight will assist the team with valuable, up to date information and insights into their log data, both structured and unstructured. vSAN is deployed across remote office clusters to fully realize the efficiencies and cost savings of managing their storage virtually. Networking and Security is extremely important as Guardian is a large insurer. They are evaluating VMware NSX across various environments, including remote sites, to enable micro-segmentation and establishing remote networking and security to allow them to function as if they are all on one network.
Learn More
- Understand the Savings Possible Download the Forrester Report:
Total Economic Impact of VMware Automated Application Deployment - Read some vRealize Automation customer case studies
- Try our software in a hosted Hands on Lab
- HOL-SDC-1621 vRealize Automation 101: Application and Infrastructure Delivery and DevOps with Code Stream
- HOL-SDC-1624 VMware NSX and the vRealize Suite
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