Customer Background
Our customer is a Major Retailer of Construction and Do It Yourself (DIY) supplies with a presence all across North America and Mexico. The home improvement retailer provides full-service, warehouse-style store that sell a wide assortment of building materials, home improvement products and garden products.
Technology Used
The products and technologies used in this effort by our team and the customer were,
- ASP.NET Framework 4.5 and ASP.Net MVC 5.2
- AngularJS, JQuery and Bootstrap Framework
- Microsoft SQL Server 2014
- Windows PowerShell
- Windows Services
- SOAP Web Services and Web RESTful APIs
- Integration with Service Management system - ServiceNow (SaaS)
- Integration with Systems Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and SpaceWalk
- GitLab, Team Foundation Server, Slack and Windows Installer XML (WiX)
The Business Challenge
Our customer supports patch management to over 2,200 stores and regional data centers totaling over 150,000 servers overall. Our customer has a team of over 90 resources, both onshore and offshore, dedicated to the manual process of scheduling servers and reporting the patching of these servers.
The customer was challenged with no single integrated solution that served all aspects of service management, patch scheduling and deployment. The retail customer was looking for innovative and scalable solution designed for the future with below features,
- A design that will create a single application to schedule and automate the work of patch management for various operating systems that will scale and integrate with existing systems for Service Management and Patch Deployment
- A design that maintains high degrees of security configuration compliance
- A design that will allow multiple user roles, handles security, complex business rules and workflow for patch management
- A design that has a responsive interface and mimics an 'Outlook' style interface for a user-friendly experience
Our Solution and Support
The customer partnered with us to achieve the strategic goal of eliminating the manual error-prone method of scheduling servers for patching and its compliance reporting. Our team has the skills and expertise to architect and design an end-to-end enterprise solution based on Microsoft and Open technologies with scalable integration support even in challenging environments.
The customer was using the best solutions in different areas, but this could lead to challenges in itself. To alleviate these challenges, we focused on integration as a key piece in the design of our patch scheduling solution in addition to providing simplified Patch management interface for business users. The goal of our solution was to reduce cost, risk, and complexity of managing and patching endpoints.
- Designed an architecture, which supports security-driven scheduling, multi-tier workflow management, automation, compliance auditing and reporting and integration with complex systems via APIs
- Designed a user-centric interface to provide real-time visibility into managed and unmanaged endpoints, its patch schedule and compliance status
- Developed and delivered the enterprise application using our Global Delivery model through SCRUM agile methodology to produce product features at a faster pace to meet challenging timelines
- We iterated quickly through the architecture, design, UI and development phases syncing frequently with the customer to make sure everyone was aligned on the scope, timeline and required quality
- Designed an intuitive, user-friendly and responsive user interface to allow scheduling and management of large number servers using devices of various form factors
- Designed robust and complex rules-based workflows to meet various business processes and security requirements. A process driven application tailored to different roles
- Developed a bi-directional API-based integration framework to interface with customer's Service Management product (ServiceNow), Windows (System Center Configuration Manager) and Linux (SpaceWalk) patch deployment tools
- Developed an automation framework that connected scheduling, notification, patching and compliance reporting without the need for manual intervention for patch management
- Designed a scalable architecture to allow scheduling and patching of servers based on server's lifecycle via deployment instance connectors
- The application lifecycle management was governed by a combination of Open Source and Microsoft products
Customer Benefits
Through our innovative solution and strong delivery team, we were able to assist customer in achieving their strategic goals in short time frame. The customer was able to provide their internal customer's a single tool to view, schedule and manage their endpoints/applications and stay in compliance with minimum dependency on IT/Patch administration staff.
Additionally, the customer was
- Able to significantly reduce patching cycle time by streamlining processes and tightly integrating with assets system of record (ServiceNow)
- Able to reduce labor costs significantly by automating patch management activities and its compliance reporting
- Able to reduce labor costs significantly by automating Change Management process by auto-generation of Change request records in ServiceNow
- Able to continuously monitor and enforce compliance with security, regulatory and operational policies to keep endpoints secure and protected
- Able to patch across heterogeneous platforms through a single interface
- Able to reduce patch scheduling process from weeks to minutes
- Able to eliminate human errors and achieve better control on data integrity and compliance reporting
- Able to decrease risks and service disruptions through the Emergency console by controlling patch deployments
- Able to increase productivity through this central application for all patch, configuration and reporting needs
- Able to discover unmanaged endpoints and remediation of non-compliant systems reducing risk and labor costs
