Fortune 500 multinational tech company: Upgrading the management of a critical network environment

The automated approval process workflow enabled all appropriate employees within the company to request DNS changes, and central administrators to approve or deny the update, reducing the number of change tickets to 0.

The challenge

The customer was managing a large number of inefficient Unix DNS and DHCP servers that required considerable and expensive administration overhead, both with regard to OS and software patching and also in the day-to-day management of entries.

The customer has an extremely dynamic environment as it invests heavily in R&D, resulting in fast-changing production sites. With distributed global operations and a growing product portfolio, the DDI environment is constantly changing. All changes to the DDI environment were performed centrally by a large team that worked according to complex and detailed SLAs they had with various departments within the company. This created an expensive and inefficient system that suffered from a lack of overview, and significantly slowed service within the company.

“Various business units need DNS, DHCP and IP address information for their internal operations. To retrieve those data was very inefficient and time-consuming. Now with the Micetro API, the users can automatically access information in real-time, providing the data needed for their departmental applications.”

Our solution

The customer selected Men&Mice to assist with upgrading the management of their critical network environment. This was achieved both by implementing Micetro and by automating certain business processes to obtain the greatest efficiencies.

A key part of the upgrade was to migrate all DNS and DHCP infrastructure to Microsoft Windows 2008R2. IPAM information was migrated from a homegrown solution into Micetro. With this first phase, the company was able to achieve great savings and efficiencies by redeploying 80% of the staff previously dedicated to managing the DDI infrastructure.

An automated approval process workflow was implemented enabling all appropriate employees within the company to request DNS changes, and central administrators to approve or deny the update. This reduced the number of change tickets through the service desk from about 500 per month to 0.

Benefits

The unique and flexible structure of Micetro lends itself well to the automation of individual business processes within enterprises. This, along with specialized industry knowledge and solid customer relationships, helped this strategically critical project succeed. Our customer has increased their service levels, improved the security and overall uptime of their critical network resources, and achieved significant cost savings.