Digital transformation has two facets. On one hand, it enables organisations to be more efficient and competitive by gaining flexibility and agility. On the other hand, it creates new risks and requires reinforced security. "Our customers are looking for high availability, maximum security, flexibility and cost reduction at the same time," explains Gilles Fersing. "To meet their needs for agility and security, we have partnered with Red Hat and its scalable automation system: Ansible Automation Platform.”
This platform, which is now a standard, contains all the tools to implement enterprise-wide IT automation. "Our solution is non-intrusive, quick to deploy and has a catalogue of ready-to-use procedures," continues Niko Vanraes. "The modules provide users with a common language that is easy to learn, read and share, even for users who are not experienced developers. The solution allows for role-based access management and task scheduling. It also offers the ability to analyse and compile data and generate reports on the status of automation deployments."
More innovation, more responsiveness and more security
For Olivier Raggi and Thomas Flachaire, opting for this solution was the obvious choice for several reasons. "It enables us to offer our customers the best tools currently in the market while reducing their operating and running costs, and we have created a real internal community entirely focused on automation. By doing so, we have been able to break down silos and increase our capacity for innovation. "The technological and economic contexts are favourable to these kinds of solutions. Services such as the cloud, which is being used more and more, are driving automation. Companies need to be increasingly responsive and minimise the time-to-market for their products or services. By taking over repetitive tasks, automation allows our teams to focus on higher value-added activities and to improve the quality of our services. We can also deploy a standardized security process on all our systems in a relatively short time and thus guarantee maximum security to all our customers.”
Being able to guarantee security for its customers was also a non-negotiable point for the data management and protection expert. "We pay a great deal of attention to the security of our customers' infrastructures, but also to our processes. Automation enables us to reduce the risk of human error, which can be significant when managing a large number of customers, especially as many manual operations are involved. We can thus achieve the homogenisation and standardisation of all the infrastructures that we manage. Our RISC teams are therefore better equipped to carry out their supervision.
A fruitful collaboration with LuxTrust
Frédéric Laurain is Head of Operations at LuxTrust, the national trust services provider in the Grand Duchy. He confirmed the benefits of automation in an online interview. "The solution that EBRC's experts implemented brought us a lot of benefits. We save a considerable amount of time during our mass operations such as the patching sessions (program corrections) that we perform several times a year. Our IT equipment is homogeneous with standardised environments. As a result, we increased our security and reduced our costs. We are so satisfied that we now want to go further by automating the application part of our infrastructure.”
“Our collaboration with LuxTrust is a perfect illustration of the market trend," concludes Thomas Flachaire. "Automation is often seen as a way to reduce costs. In reality, it is much more than that. With IT needs rapidly growing, it is important to be continuously more agile, faster and more efficient. Thanks to Ansible, which allows us to manage all our technologies with a single tool, automation brought us undeniable added value, both for us and for our customers, and became a real strategic support.”
You can watch the entire roundtable by clicking here or contact us if you want to learn more about our automation solutions.