Enhance security with automation: A Red Hat customer success series

Every organization in fast-paced industries and environments must address the challenge of integrating IT teams, security groups, and solutions. While each approach to security is different, strategies can be adapted to help protect valuable data, applications, IT systems, networks, and devices from malicious or unintended activities.

To help share these strategies, this e-book highlights 4 Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform customer success stories that demonstrate how they applied these strategies to integrate and scale security management. These customers can now better protect against threats across their enterprise in a coordinated, unified way.

How does automation enhance security? 

Organizations have knowledgeable security and IT teams. However, configuring thousands of systems, cloud resources, related infrastructure, edge devices, and applications manually to protect against attackers takes more time and more resources than many enterprises can maintain. Additionally, security teams may not have access to the infrastructure that requires protection, leaving them reliant on equally busy IT staff. 

Automation can close these skill and resource gaps by applying and enforcing security standards that adapt to meet internal and external guidelines. The result offers drastically faster response times and reduced vulnerability risks in the AI era.

Security teams must also respond to more sophisticated, adaptive AI attacks. These security risks are discovered and catalogued at increased speed and can be exploited even faster using AI. Security tools and services can help reduce incident volume, identify at-risk data, spot security gaps, and detect breaches early to support rapid, more precise response and resolution. 

What does a unified security approach include? 

Security solutions are constantly evolving to stay ahead of security threats. An effective approach to protecting against threats and remediating vulnerabilities includes:

• At-scale patching: Address known vulnerabilities proactively to help reduce the attack surface. Rather than manual and time-consuming efforts, automate security updates at scale. Dynamically select the right inventory, then apply patches on a schedule.
• Investigation enhancement: Collect logs across diverse IT infrastructure automatically to help expedite investigations, as well as context and forensics gathering. Use event-driven automated remediation for response at any time, creating tickets and notifications.
• Incident response: Remediate faster responses, such as immediately disabling a suspicious user or activity, reapplying a source of truth configuration or trusted baseline, patching rapidly, and creating backups.
• Validation and hardening: Keep systems aligned to policies to help improve the security posture. Add automated provisioning and validation to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Regularly scan for and correct drift to improve defenses. 
• Compliance enforcement: Use reliable, dynamic inventory gathering, along with compliance scanning and reporting, to enforce and document compliance requirements. Demonstrate governance through audit trails, role-based access control (RBAC), and reporting across every automated action.

Why choose Ansible Automation Platform to automate security?

Enterprise security is every employee’s responsibility. Ansible Automation Platform is an agentless tool that supports the entire IT organization, from IT operations and development to network engineers and security teams. This user-friendly approach helps organizations use automation to: 

• Deliver faster mean time to resolution (MTTR): Automating routine tasks and adopting automated event-driven or AI-driven issue response, teams can establish better resiliency and reduce MTTR. 
• Improve consistency and accuracy: Responding with identical, defined actions, teams react using the desired solution to an issue. This approach reduces the cost of human error and helps avoid unintentional security gaps. 
• Increase productivity: Automating a variety of tasks, including high-volume routine work, teams easily build security into processes and can instead focus on priority work and innovation.
• Manage all IT infrastructure efficiently: Handling configuration management and workflow orchestration, while automating audit reporting. 

Ansible Automation Platform helps teams automate and integrate security solutions that can respond to threats consistently across the enterprise, using a curated, unified set of automation assets and workflows as part of cross-functional processes. The platform also integrates with security solutions to investigate and respond to threats as quickly as possible.

The following success stories illustrate the benefits of automation for risk management and how Ansible Automation Platform can help organizations enhance their security posture. 

Based in Indonesia, PT. KB Finansia Multi Finance (Kreditplus) had adopted a wide range of technologies since its inception more than 30 years ago. Its operations team was spending a lot of time ensuring that this diverse environment focused on security and compliance with increasingly complex regulations. Kreditplus sought to standardize on a modern environment to provide a better developer experience and reduce time to market for new services. 

Advanced automation with Ansible Automation Platform 

The constraints imposed by Kreditplus’ diverse legacy environment made it difficult to operate in a rapidly evolving environment and prevented the business from expanding its services at the pace expected by its customers. To overcome these challenges, Kreditplus worked with technology partner Mitra Integrasi Informatika (MII) to standardize on Ansible Automation Platform and other Red Hat technologies.

“The environment has become tougher for financial service providers,” said Thomas Benny, Technology Builder, Kreditplus. “Customer demand is increasing, governance is increasingly complicated, and security is more crucial than ever.” 

Using Ansible Automation Platform, Kreditplus automates provisioning and security hardening across the CI/CD pipeline, from development through staging to production. Self-service capabilities also ensure that Kreditplus can get new services to market faster. For example, its IT operations teams are no longer distracted by developer requests, with a significant reduction in the support queue volume.

Accelerated security updates and issue resolutions 

Manually and individually applying fixes to each server is now a distant memory. By adopting Ansible Automation Platform, Kreditplus can ensure that its environment’s security capabilities are up-to-date at the click of a button. If any security issues arise, they can be quickly resolved.

“Previously, applying patches would mean manually running a script on every VM [virtual machine] and every server—and that would take a lot of time and operational effort,” said Benny. 

Its modernization journey has delivered benefits for Kreditplus in the first year—but the bank is only at the beginning of its journey. A modern automation platform will help Kreditplus achieve its ambition to become the best financing company in Indonesia, providing products and services that meet the needs of the Indonesian people and support the country’s economy.

“Our Red Hat technology is the core of our modernization strategy,” said Benny. “We aim to deploy all our services to our new environment, where they can benefit from our Red Hat technologies’ scalability, security, and automation. Our business, development, and operational teams are already benefiting from the ease of use, cost reduction, and enterprise-level support. These benefits will only increase as we migrate more services to our modern environment built on Red Hat technologies.”

Read the full case study: Kreditplus improves security by modernizing infrastructure

The City and County of Denver first sought a robust IT automation solution when it turned to Red Hat to support more than 15,000 remote employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this initial period, the City and County of Denver used Ansible Automation Platform to automate provisioning and scaling tasks while supporting 514% growth in Microsoft Teams use and quickly launched a virtual emergency operations center (EOC) for government leaders. 

In the years since, the City and County of Denver sought to expand its use of Ansible Automation Platform across departments to increase efficiency, align with budgets, and increase security while improving the quality and responsiveness of citizen services. Comprising 56 government agencies, the City and County of Denver offers a wide array of services. Its IT department works with almost all of these agencies. With already tight budgets constantly shrinking, the IT department was tasked with increasing efficiency and achieving financial savings using automation. 

“We wanted to help reduce mundane, repetitive tasks for government employees to free up time and empower them to better serve our residents,” said Evan Pfaff, Digital Transformation Engineer, City and County of Denver.

With successes in early projects, the team looked for new ways it could increase efficiency with automation and expand its use across government departments. This goal led to the formation of an Automation Center of Excellence (CoE), responsible for a new project intake process, capturing the benefits achieved through automation, and sharing these benefits with the business. In the last 5 years, the City and County of Denver has automated 223 processes with Ansible Automation Platform and is constantly discovering and delivering new use cases. 

Improved security and reduced team workload

The City and County of Denver’s automation team works closely with its IT security, including the creation of several Ansible Playbooks that automate security processes. For example, the team receives regular emails from CrowdStrike warning if a user’s password is on a known compromised list, and Ansible Automation Platform automatically forces the user to change their password.

“The password reset automation enhances security while resulting in a huge time saving for the information security team.”

—Holly Troy, Senior Automation Architect, City and County of Denver 

Allowing computers to be transactional so humans can be transformative

By automating processes across government departments, the City and Council of Denver can achieve its goals within budget. “With Ansible Automation Platform, we’ve seen time and financial savings equivalent to US$7,500 a day while improving security and enabling the delivery of higher-quality services to residents,” said Pfaff. 

The City’s automation team continuously addresses new use cases, including server build automation to reduce human error and ensure greater consistency, as well as increasing IT efficiency. 

Read the full case study: Denver saves $4.06 million and 81k work hours through automation

Global water technology leader Xylem helps customers solve the world’s toughest water access and management challenges across utility, industrial, commercial, and residential markets worldwide with innovation. For example, the Regional Network Interface (RNI) application helps utility companies manage water meters. 

Operational tasks, such as provisioning this application to meet security requirements in the private datacenter, were manual and time-consuming. Instances are custom-built by the Xylem network operations center. Hosted on VMs, they must be tested and scanned by the security team. Security scans, reports, and clean-ups were handled manually, a time-consuming process that could take several weeks. The pre-scan process involved service tickets, manual handoffs and multiple tools. Once a scan was complete, an engineer then checked the list of vulnerabilities, requested a fix, and repeated the process until all issues had been addressed. 

Xylem introduced Ansible Automation Platform and the included feature Event-Driven Ansible to automate security scanning, manage storage tasks, and more. Now its engineers are more productive, workflows are standardized, and the company has repeatable playbooks to optimize more back-end processes. 

Rolling out event-driven automation for security scanning

By automating these datacenter processes, such as security scanning, Xylem improved its operational efficiency, with the security scanning process identified as a key use case. If a scan finds vulnerabilities, Xylem’s security team is notified, but only the engineer to whom the ticket is assigned can trigger a rescan—eliminating the risk of unauthorized or inconsistent actions. When issues have been fixed, simply adding a comment to the ticket rescans the VM. 

“Our long-term goal is to automate everything and empower our datacenter team to be more efficient,” said Michael Johnson, Principal Automation Engineer, Xylem. “There’s room for error when processes are driven by a command-line interface (CLI), and replacing them with playbooks will help to work in a more consistent way,” Johnson added.

While users have visibility into the process and remain in control, previously time-consuming tasks are now automated, speeding the process considerably. Xylem has also built safeguards into its playbooks to prevent issues such as accidentally triggering too many scans at once. “Certain conditions have to be met in order to trigger the next step,” said Johnson.

Saving time and money while improving staff satisfaction

Every process automated with Ansible Platform saves time for Xylem’s datacenter team, helping to reduce operational costs and time to provision new RNI instances for customers. The team can now focus on higher-value, more satisfying tasks, with a better work-life balance thanks to less need for overtime.

Next, Xylem plans to automate patching, which will standardize 6 disparate work approaches into a single workflow. Long-term, the company plans to automate disaster recovery, an extremely complex capability that Johnson views as a key win to fostering an automation-first mindset. 

Read the full case study: Xylem boosts datacenter engineer productivity with automation

With Ansible Automation Platform, organizations can manage automated processes to build security into the end-to-end operational lifecycle from the start and stay ahead of malicious attacks. With access to hundreds of modules that help automate all aspects of customers’ IT environments and processes, teams can use Ansible Automation Platform to help protect complex security perimeters, unify their approach, and strengthen overall defenses against cyberattacks and vulnerabilities. Consider process that can help your organization:

• Automate key security use cases for speed, consistency, and accuracy. Whether your challenge is provisioning and configuration compliance, resource hardening, vulnerability scanning, or remediation, automated actions help teams execute in the same, accurate way. 
• Create automated workflows for fast and consistent action. IT and security teams can configure a sequence of jobs that share inventory, playbooks, or permissions to fully automate investigations or remediations, improving collaboration and expediting resolutions.
• Support access controls, including zero trust. Integrate with enterprise services to support zero trust architecture (ZTA) through RBAC, approval workflows, multilayer checkpoints, and centralized job execution.
• Track and govern every automated action. Rapidly create automated reports to understand compliance at any time. Confidently use trust features like audit trails, policy enforcement, and approval workflows to control and govern enterprise automation activities.