Red Hat, a leading provider of open-source solutions, has announced that leading Spanish insurance group, Mutua Madrileña, has used Event-Driven Ansible in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as part of its automation strategy.
The solution manages more than 60 diverse systems and platforms and helps the company’s IT team respond more quickly to real-time IT events, leading to a 50% reduction in IT incidents.
Mutua Madrileña services range from automobile, home, health and life insurance, to savings and investments. It is the leader in general insurance (Non-Life) in Spain, its main market, with an international presence in Chile and Colombia. As a result of its significant growth and diversification of activities in recent decades, Mutua Madrileña has expanded from having 28 platforms to more than 60.
Managing these complex IT environments became time-consuming – from design and deployment, to monitoring and audits, to downtime and security vulnerabilities. Without central visibility of the IT estate, it took up to two hours to identify the root cause of basic incidents. As a result, the Middleware team began looking for a solution to improve efficiency, user satisfaction and reduce management and operations costs.
Mutua Madrileña’s Middleware team decided to embed automation into every project on its roadmap, analysing where it could improve existing manual processes for a standardised approach. For this expansive automation approach, Mutua Madrileña selected Ansible Automation Platform to help fuel a consistent approach to automation everywhere in the organisation.
Additionally, to get better visibility across its varied environments, the IT team also upgraded from basic monitoring to intelligent observability with Dynatrace. This helped the team to proactively identify unusual patterns and issues in their environment before triggering Event-Driven Ansible to resolve the incident. Event-Driven Ansible enables Mutua Madrileña to respond quickly to real-time events, making operations more agile and efficient. Intelligent observability combined with event-driven automation have improved resolution times and reduced downtime for the Middleware team, who also now gains deeper insights into where to focus for continuous improvement.
Following these results, Mutua Madrileña is now evaluating how to maximise the potential of automation, embedding it into all the company’s systems and launching new services with automation and observability as standard. While this project started as a Middleware team using automation to solve a specific need, the IT organization has evaluated many processes that could benefit from it, including a self-service catalog to allow other departments to operate platforms in a controlled and audited way. Mutua Madrileña is also launching an initiative to expand its observability and self-healing methodology so other departments and platforms can also benefit from the experience of the Middleware team.
Marta Ceciliano, Head of Middleware, Automation and Observability, Mutua Madrileña, said: “Choosing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made, and we’d make the same choice again. By adding an automation stage early in the platform development lifecycle, we’ve significantly improved velocity, execution times and sped up cross-team collaboration to perform tasks. We also want automation to be mandatory for all new projects, including making it an integral part of older platforms. Having Red Hat by our side gives us the confidence and peace of mind that we are on the right path.”