Founded in 1727, NatWest Group (formerly known as The Royal Bank of Scotland Group) has over 700 branches that serve retail and commercial banking needs. As with any organization that has been around for nearly 300 years, transformation is inevitable and necessary.
Benefits of Using Puppet:
- £7M saved with automation
- 2 weeks to 3 days for production SLAs
- 201 > 4 average new build production issues
Challenge: Eliminate Inefficient Manual Processes
As part of a major digital transformation initiative, NatWest needed to eliminate manual processes, speed up software delivery cycles for internal and customer-facing applications, eliminate inefficiency, and cut costs.
The company’s typical server provisioning release cycle was marred by a lack of visibility, shell scripts and manual policy enforcement checks, and a lack of redundancy. Once built, it wasn’t uncommon for production checks to take weeks – all relying on manual effort.
As NatWest’s infrastructure shifted away from physical servers and to cloud services, automation became an obvious necessity. Puppet became their next step to increase release frequency, eliminate manual fixes and updates, and clear the stumbling blocks on their digital transformation journey.
Results: Massive Time and Cost Savings
Puppet implemented infrastructure-as-code tooling to automate server provisioning tasks as part of a major shift toward automation. This meant that most of the bank’s ~600 servers could automate configuration management and save valuable time.
NatWest was able to save an astonishing £7 million as a direct result of automation — all accomplished by eliminating inefficiencies.
You can hear exactly how NatWest used Puppet to modernize their change and release management process as part of their automation journey in a webinar between Puppet and David Sandilands (then Infrastructure Engineer with RBS Group/NatWest, now Principal Solutions Architect with Puppet by Perforce):
NatWest used automation for processes and capabilities to overcome time-wasting bottlenecks. For example, internal SLAs that handle items fit-for-production were reduced from 2 weeks to only 3 days. Jira tickets were also reduced from an average of 201 issues arising from a new build to only 4 production-impacting issues.
You can also dive into the full story of savings in “RBS automates away £7 million in manual server provisioning tasks,” published on InfoWorld.
See for yourself how Puppet can drive efficiency in your organization through automation. Try it today or request a demo with the Puppet team.