F500 Enterprise Company Enlists Empowered Networks to Improve Automation

Summary

This large diversified Financial Services player has been helping customers achieve their financial goals for over 100 years. With over 12,000 employees and a large complex network with locations spanning across North America, they needed to improve automation between NetMRI, Infoblox’s proprietary network change and configuration management (NCCM) system and their CMDB (ServiceNow) instance, in order to take advantage of the authoritative sources of data found in NetMRI. This required a more strategic approach to connect the people, processes and systems that traditionally had been separate and fragmented.

This engagement was initiated when the ServiceNow and Network teams reached out to Empowered and Infoblox, as their trusted advisors, to support them in defining and implementing a new strategic integration strategy and standardize on an authoritative source of data. The Empowered team immediately recognized that a strategic assessment of their current approach was required in order to affect meaningful change.

Implementation of the subsequent recommendations resulted in a sustainable solution that didn’t require costly and challenging restructuring of their organization. The new approach supported consistent information sharing between teams and a common reconciliation point. This new synergy resulted in improved data quality,  helping them make more informed business decisions.

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The Situation

Recognizing that both organizational and data silos, as well as limited collaboration, was directly and negatively impacting efficiencies, both teams had conceptually defined their own solutions. While there was consensus that an automated, authoritative and unified view of the data was required, both teams were limited in that they were describing the  proposed solutions in the context of their own systems, the network and  the CMDB.

In the absence of a defined authoritative source of record, the respective end-goals weren’t compatible, and the lack of strategic collaboration persisted. Further, the security team’s desire for consistent and strict configurations proved to be difficult due to the manual and time-consuming processes in place. This added yet another layer of complexity. In order to affect change, improve efficiencies and reduce risk, key stakeholders from the respective teams needed to step back, assess the overall strategic business goals and think big.

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The Challenge

Organizations today are under tremendous pressure to effectively and efficiently manage and maximize the value and consistency of torrents of data across the enterprise. While this large, Fortune 500 Financial Services company had invested in some of the most robust and advanced technologies to capture business critical data, they were similarly challenged with disconnected and isolated information.

On the network side, Infoblox NetMRI was acting as the authoritative resource of reference for comprehensive information on their network devices while their CMDB was acting as the corporate system of record, responsible for driving their core business processes. The lack of synchronization between the data sources impacted data quality and the subsequent business process dependent on it.

Solution: Empowered deployed a solution that automated the synchronization from NetMRI, as the source of truth for the network, to the CMDB as the source of record, while supporting customer specific data fields and respecting other discovery sources and existing business rules. Empowered’s real-world experience and strategic approach provided a clear path to an optimal and fully operational NetMRI and CMDB integration.

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The solution delivered an automated capability enabling:

• Synchronization of NetMRI derived network device data to their CMDB
• The ability to reconcile and control device information with other potential sources of discovery data, in a unified view
• Real-time alerting of problems in the ecosystem
• Support for all standard infrastructure device types currently available within NetMRI
• A single source of truth for network device data

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The Result

Automated synchronization from NetMRI, as the source of truth for the network, to the CMDB as the source of record, enabled:

• A single source of authoritative data
• The ability to leverage the existing data-rich device information currently available within NetMRI, directly within their CMDB instance
• Standardization of process and consistent visibility and communications across different parts of the business that had  been previously fragmented
• Improved data quality and confidence to make informed  business decisions
• Reduced risk due to a consistent view of the operational network environment
• Improved efficiencies and elimination of manual reconciliation processes