Mutua Madrileña standardizes automation and increases agility with Red Hat

Mutua Madrileña achieved much of its growth through mergers and acquisitions. In the process, it accumulated and supported multiple platforms and integrations, resulting in a complex IT landscape.

In 2016, the business scaled from 28 platforms to more than 60. Mutua Madrileña launched a digital transformation strategy to navigate the complexity. This involved the introduction of even more technologies.

Manual management became increasingly time-consuming and prone to operational errors. To save time and decrease obstacles, Mutua Madrileña set out to adapt its processes, redefine platform lifecycle stages, and maximize its use of automation.

To streamline operations, Mutua Madrileña identified opportunities for automation. This included provisioning critical platforms and creating business recovery plan environments—unique repositories containing platform configuration data vulnerabilities—as well as monitoring the platform, installing fixes, and supporting application lifecycle management during continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

The team also adopted GitOps centralized provisioning, operation, and maintenance into a single source of truth. By introducing automation into the platform development lifecycle early, Mutua Madrileña sped up processes that once created obstacles.

When Mutua Madrileña saw the benefits of automation, it decided to look for a tool to support automation in a much wider set of use cases using application programming interfaces (APIs). Choosing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform was a critical part of this process and integral to its success.

The team now uses integrated intelligent observability from Dynatrace with artificial intelligence (AI) to proactively identify unusual patterns in the environment before triggering Event-Driven Ansible to resolve incidents and enable application recovery.

This combination of enhanced observability and self-healing has delivered important improvements in both resolution times and service downtimes, as well as a 50% reduction in service tickets.

Features such as intelligent log management now monitor both the server and application logs. If a capacity error is detected, alerts are generated and Event-Driven Ansible automatically addresses issues on the applications or platforms.

Sharpening its competitive edge with a unified automation framework, Mutua Madrileña can now differentiate itself in the market with a range of new and competitive features.

Standard development methodologies and in-house knowledge accelerate the provision of new platforms in different environments and with the correct configurations. These can then be customized with no loss of functionality. This accelerates time to market for new developments and allows Mutua Madrileña to spin up new environments quickly in the event of a disaster.

Ease of deployment is a key factor in this improvement. Greater platform control also improves incident response times for development teams. The middleware team can now support development teams to operate the platform in a controlled manner, optimizing response times for any incident or unwanted condition. The Dynatrace intelligent engine uses AI to detect unusual application activity or behavior, triggering an automated Event-Driven Ansible workflow to resolve any problems. Doing so reduces or even eliminates the impact of known errors without disrupting applications.

Automating repetitive tasks frees up Mutua Madrileña’s highly qualified technicians to focus on more valuable work. As well as cutting costs, they can now spend more time designing and implementing innovative, market-ready solutions that meet company goals and customer needs.

Looking ahead, the team will leverage the potential of automation, embedding it into company systems across the board.

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