IBM Global Technology Services uses IBM BPM on Cloud to simplify security compliance of clients’ IT infrastructure
The IBM GTS team went from concept to production 3x faster with IBM BPM on Cloud when compared to typical traditional projects.
As cloud continues to transform how businesses work, we see a lot of success where customers are building their next generation business processes in the cloud. Forward-leaning organizations are heading into mainstream cloud adoption for process management, and IBM operations teams are leading this charge. Teams within IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) have had great success using IBM Business Process Manager on Cloud (IBM BPMoC) to manage the compliance processes for the IT infrastructure delivered to clients through the Global Process Orchestration (GPO) initiative.
The need for speed on end-to-end security compliance
IBM GTS manages hundreds of thousands of IT assets for clients across the globe and looks for consistent, repeatable, metrics-based processes to exceed customer expectations on the delivery of IT infrastructure. The IBM GTS Service Delivery Application team needed to improve and scale-up the security compliance process of their customers’ IT infrastructure based on individual service level agreements (SLAs) personalized for each specific client’s needs.
Every time a security compliance health check is run on any GTS hosted client application, hundreds of thousands of potential security warnings could arise and each one must be managed end-to-end for a safe and compliant resolution within the time stipulated in the SLA. Many times, specific tasks needed to be escalated and prioritized, and the GTS team needed continuous metrics on where each client’s compliance level stood. And the team needed to roll this out to over 3000 users at over 30 IBM GTS clients over the course of just a few months. To achieve this time-to-value and rapid rollout worldwide, the IBM GTS team turned to IBM BPM on Cloud, a full-featured iBPMS available in the cloud.
Improve time to market with IBM BPM on Cloud
IBM BPMoC enabled the team to rapidly run the health check process to analyze each risk assessment, compare it to the personalized SLA of each client, classify and shortlist which violations needs to be remedied, decide on the right tool needed to fix each valid violation from over a dozen tools, automatically open a ticket in the appropriate system and keep track of the remediation process until the customer’s application is back in security compliance.
Before using IBM BPMoC, this complex process was done manually and there were unintended variations on the exact procedures used in each business unit (North America, Europe and Growth Markets) as individual compliance teams interpreted the written processes slightly differently. Now, with BPMoC, exactly the same process implementation is executed worldwide. On average, each end-to-end health check process instance is now successfully completed 4x faster compared with the existing solution.
Customer satisfaction has also improved. Clients are provided an up-to-the-minute assessment of the compliance of their IT infrastructure. The speed to market that the IBM GTS team was able to achieve with this major initiative has been transformational; the team went from concept to production for the end-to-end security health checks 3x faster with BPMoC as part of their GPO initiative when compared to their traditional approach.The IBM GTS team expects to save over $60M when the new compliance process is rolled out to all clients.
Next steps: IBM BPM on Cloud and the GPO initiative become the standard for IBM GTS service delivery
Based on the successes in the health check security compliance process, IBM GTS is looking to roll out the GPO program and IBM BPMoC to cover all service delivery processes at GTS. The team is actively working to design the next process to be adopted across thousands of IBM GTS clients to handle end-to-end patch management for several hundred thousand systems across the globe.
From identifying the necessary software patches for each system under management across a wide variety of vendor software, to handling change management requests at each client for each system to checking against a centralized IBM risk management system to ensure every client stay within acceptable risk, IBM BPMoC will orchestrate and manage these complex processes at scale. Once the patch management process goes live worldwide, the GPO team has another 10 to 12 critical processes that will be moved onto IBM BPM on Cloud.
“By using IBM BPM on Cloud to orchestrate our client’s security compliance, we can get to market three times faster with 40% of the effort to meet or exceed our SLAs. And we can now give clients clearer visibility into the level of compliance of their IT infrastructure at any given time.”
Scott Kinane
Director, Service Delivery Application Development
IBM GTS
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