A large government data center in Europe, boasting a workforce of 1300 employees, prides itself on utilizing cutting-edge technologies to enhance the IT services provided to their administration. The Government Cloud has now been transformed into a certified, fully-automated, fail-safe solution, thanks to the advanced cloud technology implemented by comdivision.
“We offer Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), as well as professional administration services to our clients, the various government agencies. We also provide orchestration and management support when we transfer our clients’ data into the (private) cloud,” stated the head of infrastructure. “The government agencies benefit from the cloud's efficiency and flexibility advantages, but we needed to change the way we provision resources,” he added.
“We often encounter situations where manual processes and provisioning lead to frustration and policy violations,” observed Yves Sandfort, comdivision’s lead architect for this project. “The infrastructure team was dedicating a significant amount of time to build what the internal clients required,” he elaborated, “factor in approval processes and security measures, and you can see why it could take up to 100 days to provision a new system for the dev ops teams.”
“We proposed using Aria Automation to create an automated private cloud for the internal clients,” Sandfort explained. comdivision demonstrated how firewalls could be deployed for each virtual machine, utilizing VMware NSX’s micro-segmentation, to enable more precise configuration of security measures. “In our design, we customized NSX-v to automate the configuration of security groups and policies for these firewalls,” Sandfort detailed. Additionally, comdivision's design included the integration of Red Hat's systems management suite “Satellite” and the software configuration tool “Puppet,” facilitating fully automated Linux deployments from the ground up.
With the introduction of a self-service portal, comdivision empowered the internal customers to request needed services on-demand, which would then be provisioned in a fully automated manner.
“comdivision transformed a process that was measured in weeks, or sometimes months,” said the head of infrastructure, “and now – with the assistance of Aria Automation and NSX – we are measuring the same processes in minutes,” he commended.
“Integrating Satellite and Puppet provided the customer with a pristine installation, including custom configurations for the users,” Sandfort noted. “My team also implemented a ticket system with a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to automatically document the business processes.”
