The client, Headquartered in London with a number of offices around the world, the client is a financial services firm providing services to a wide range of institutions globally.

Spun out from one of the world’s most successful absolute return investment managers in 2018, the client provides web-based portfolio management tools and outsourced services across all investment management and trading functions, including quantitative support, risk analysis, operations, treasury and regulatory reporting.

Natilik have partnered with the client for over ten years, working together on numerous projects spanning collaboration, data centre and networking technologies.

 

  • Challenge
  • Solution
  • Outcome

Challenge

As a company which supports the central IT for large hedge funds and investment management companies, the client needed to ensure they had a solution in place to support their clients.

The client has a small IT team in a rapidly growing business. Their legacy data centre technology lacked the functionality to automate and quickly apply changes across environments when needed to support both their business as well as those of their clients, causing slower performance and a resource strain on the team. Due to the manual nature of processes in place, all policy changes were required to go through an approval chain which hindered the agility of the business, left them vulnerable to human error mistakes and prevented the team from being able to roll back changes at speed.

The client’s team needed a software-defined solution to provide much needed automation to help with the day-to-day management of their IT environment as well as those of their clients, and to provide the consistency and agility the team needed to work as efficiently as possible. Their main goal was to elevate their technology and future proof their business with a software-defined approach

Solution

As a long standing client of Natilik, the client knew of Natilik’s capabilities in the DevNet space and, as the first partner to be fully Cisco Devnet certified, Natilik was in the perfect position to support the team in helping to define, design and implement the software-defined solution that they were looking for.
After attending a number of Natilik’s renown DevNet express events as well as exploring Cisco’s ACI capabilities at Cisco Live, the team was able to see the full impact of what DevOps and a software-defined solution could help them achieve.

After taking time to properly understand the client’s challenges and the outcomes they were looking for from their new solution, the Natilik Team designed and deployed a software-defined solution which incorporated Cisco ACI and allows them to benefit from Natilik’s IaC offering. Natilik IaC helps to simplify the day-to-day management, configuration and expansion of the client’s environment. It allows the team to automate changes in line with the security policies, minimizing the risk of human errors.

Outcome

The client now has a fully software-defined solution in place which has transformed the way their small IT team manage not only their own environment but the environments of their clients too.

The automation now in place allows the team to quickly make changes which can easily be pushed out across multiple environments. They are able to easily revert to the pre-change state if required, providing the control and flexibility they need to deliver agility and speed to the business. Tasks that previously required a couple of weeks to complete can now be done in just a few days and removing these repetitive and mundane tasks has allowed the team time to focus on other business-critical projects, helping to accelerate transformation within the business.

Change and version control is embedded which, combined with the ability for the team to easily search any changes, provides the team with the visibility they need to respond with agility to any issues, helping to provide a great service to their clients and minimize any potential downtime to their environments.

The project has helped bridge the gap between the infrastructure, software development and application teams, helping remove silos so the client can benefit from improved efficiency and innovation that comes with cross-team collaboration.

  • Simplified Management

    Tasks which were time-consuming and manual can now be pushed out across entire environments automatically.

  • Reduced Risk

    The automation now in place greatly reduces the rick of any human error occurring, ensuring the client and their clients can enjoy less disruption to the business.

  • Increased Agility

    Tasks which previous took a couple weeks can now be done in a matter of days, greatly increasing how quickly the teams can react and implement any required changes.