“It takes 5 minutes to see the value of Rundeck. I wish I’d had it 20 years ago.”
-Phil Todd (Director of Software Development at CSG)
- Empowered the organization with self-service access to operations procedures
- Replaced expensive and cumbersome legacy tools that interfered with how his organization wants to work
With 500 clients and 4,000+ employees in over 20 countries, there is a good chance that CSG is the company behind your cable bill.
Continuing CSG’s tradition of being leaders in IT transformation, Phil Todd and his colleagues have a company-wide initiative to enable self-service operations (for example, restarting apps, clearing log directories, and provisioning infrastructure).
The Challenge:
Phil (Director, Software Development) found himself faced with expensive legacy tools. It became clear that these tools weren’t going to enable the broad self-service operations envisaged by Phil and his colleagues.
There were multiple problems with the existing legacy tools, including:
- Built for a legacy, pre-cloud and DevOps era
- Updating the automation required time-intensive centralized management from specialist teams
- Didn’t fit into an SDLC and source control centric way of working
Phil and his colleagues concluded that they needed a new tool to enable self-service. They looked for a tool that could both support a modern style of working and support CSG’s heterogeneous and highly-regulated environment.
“The Rundeck team fully comprehends our business and technical issues and how to help.”
-Phil Todd
Rundeck at CSG: Today
Rundeck was initially brought in as the automated runbooks that manage Chef policies (used for server automation) and the delivery pipeline.
For CSG, the decision to deploy Rundeck was simple.
- Usability: Rundeck’s quick set-up and easy-to-use interface sped adoption and reduce pushback.
- ROI: Self-service automation saves teams countless hours
- Security: Rundeck’s access controls and audit tracking help make self-service a reality
“It takes 5 minutes to see the value of Rundeck. I wish I’d had it 20 years ago.”
-Phil Todd
Rundeck at CSG: What’s Next?
CSG is beginning a 2020 initiative that leverages Rundeck to establish true self-service operations across the company.
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Self-service for All
Empower frontline staff, like the customer care team, to use automated runbooks created in Rundeck to address level 1 service issues.
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Service Request Platform
Streamline the process for requestors of infrastructure or application environment updates. CSG is leveraging Rundeck to provide self-service access to provisioning tasks, even those with multiple dependencies (like database access).
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Change Control/Request
Manual or out-of-band change control tracking can be arduous work. With Rundeck, the change request evidence is part of the job execution. These records reduce the overhead of both those making the change and those managing the change control process.
Learn more about CSG’s transformation
To learn more about how CSG is transforming its operations, watch this keynote by Phil’s colleagues, Scott Prugh and Erica Morrison at The DevOps Enterprise Summit.
