Swisscom Ditches the ‘Manual’ Mindset + Reclaims Operations Time with Puppet

Swisscom is a major telecommunications service provider dedicated to driving digitalization and networking for partners and customers globally. With different configuration setups in different on-premises environments, the company chose Puppet to create a simpler, more efficient change rollout process across its infrastructure.

Benefits of Using Puppet:

• Cut deployment from days to minutes for Swisscom’s chat app.
• Reduced costs of manual configuration and maintenance.
• 2-hour rollout of system-wide packages (down from a week or more).
• Eliminated ‘manual’ mindset that had taken root in the operations team.

Challenge: Error-Prone Manual Processes and a Deeply Ingrained Mindset

Before Puppet, Swisscom’s operations teams spent hundreds of hours maintaining a mixed IT environment including Solaris, IBM AIX, and Oracle Linux host servers. They found themselves bogged down in manual updates, configuration, and other repeat tasks – and still plagued by error-prone touchpoints.

Swisscom also used individual scripts to ensure certain system configurations like security and performance optimization. When scheduling tasks through a previous provider, Swisscom realized the solution was not only more expensive than others on the market, but also more time-consuming and less efficient.

The 'manual’ mindset gradually became ingrained as IT teams accepted the status quo, making it harder to divorce the team of their existing, inadequate processes without widespread change. For Swisscom, the directive was clear: Cut down on error-prone processes, replace their existing solution, reduce cost, and free up operations for more important work.

Results: Automation Efficiency + Configuration Consistency 

"If you do tasks manually, there will always be mistakes somewhere. If you automate, you eliminate the mistakes of human error."

Roman Frei, Systems Engineer, Swisscom

With Puppet Tasks and Puppet Enterprise, Swisscom’s operations team was able to do away with manual tasks. Leveraging the power of automation helped them reduce cost, increase efficiency, and let go of their internal manual mindset.

"If you do tasks manually, there will always be mistakes somewhere,” Frei said. “If you automate, you eliminate the mistakes of human error.” 

Watch: Swisscom Also Uses Puppet to Manage Dev, Testing + Production Servers for Its Innovative Chat App

The Swisscom team transformed its operations by adopting consistent and repeatable configuration management for their infrastructure, replacing their lacking configuration processes. Puppet configuration management helped them cut down on the manual time needed to roll out changes across servers. 

“Before we had a skeleton script for these rollouts and every time we had to modify it with the new package name and dependencies,” said Roman Frei, System Engineer at Swisscom. “Puppet enables us to act a lot faster when we encounter changes that we need to roll out across our whole infrastructure.”

Puppet helps IT teams across industries save time as they create, manage, and maintain better, more secure infrastructure. Try Puppet Enterprise for free on up to 10 nodes or request a demo to see it in action with our team. 

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