Ensono transforms operations with Red Hat

Ensono, a global managed service provider, unified its previously isolated community based automation efforts by migrating to Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform. The transformation resulted in more than 210,000 hours saved, leading to increased productivity and more than 40 million automation tasks delivered in a single year. Developers across the business now benefit from efficient tooling such as Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, Event-Driven Ansible and content collections, boosting adoption and consistency. Clients experience faster remediation and proactive support, while Ensono is strengthening its internal community of practice and culture of automation, positioning itself for future expansion with event-driven automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

Nathan Yelton, Infrastructure Lead for Red Hat Ansible and Integration, Ensono: Ensono specializes in the connected modern hybrid cloud, everything from IBM Z processors and mainframes all the way through to hyperscalers and private cloud. My responsibility is for the Ansible Automation Platform and evangelizing its use within Ensono to encourage savings while using automation to delight our clients.

Yelton: Like many businesses, we were using pockets of engineering automation across the enterprise, but they were isolated. They were helping the business, but we needed more strategy behind their implementation. We had lots of instances of Ansible AWX, but that caused us upstream and downstream integration challenges. We wanted to make it easier for associates and technologists to consume that unified platform, and the transition from AWX to Ansible Automation Platform was key to building that.

Yelton: We partnered with Red Hat Consulting to take our decades of experience on open source Ansible products and make sure that we were aligned to the more commercial side of the best practices. This allowed us to get the platform out there and start realizing the benefits as soon as possible.

Yelton: We’ve been using Ansible Lightspeed to give creators on that initial part of the journey tools to help them write their first playbooks, and it’s led to a real uplift in user adoption. I often use it myself, as I don’t write as many playbooks as I used to. 

Ansible content collections have become our de facto. We recommend that all creators across the enterprise use those sources to help build trust with our security teams and our clients. On the analytics side, it’s also given us a trusted view of the data when it comes out of the platform.

We also use Ansible content navigator and the Visual Studio Code plugin to provide a consistent development environment and avoid catches going into production. Taking advantage of Ansible environment builder to build consistent execution environments and use them in development and production has also really helped to smooth the transition from the dev, test, and creation process all the way down to production.

Yelton: As we moved away from open source AWX environments, we decided to adopt GitOps and push that ease of use and deployment forward. Red Hat OpenShift® was the perfect solution for that; it gave us the peace of mind of an end-to-end supported platform, from Red Hat OpenShift through Red Hat Enterprise Linux® and onto Ansible Automation Platform.

By deploying Ansible Automation Platform on Red Hat OpenShift, our lifecycle management is so much easier. Common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) are delivered by Red Hat, and we can confidently test them as code in our dev and test environments and move them through to production generally without issue. Ansible Automation Platform also allows us to handle lifecycle management without end users even realizing. That comes from the underpinning of GitOps and Red Hat OpenShift, delivering the compute we need and that stability we want.

Yelton: The impact was clear from the very first data delivered to the analytics platform. As an engineer, I didn't realize the value of those analytics until I started to see the numbers go up, which really validated the decision we’d made. It's since become almost a daily visit to make sure the numbers are still rising, and I can talk confidently to the rest of the senior leadership and other automators across Ensono about how they can identify value. We can show real-world examples within our enterprise of how automation can help and give real insight into where the savings come from. Our senior leadership needs to invest in the platform, so showing them those real-time gains as they come through is great.

Yelton: We identified over 210,000 hours saved using Ansible Automation Platform in the year to the end of April 2025, with over 40 million automation tasks performed during that time. Not all playbooks are equal, so I like to look at both those metrics and really get a sense of the platform’s scale. My favorite moment was that point when we realized that the platform was averaging more than 1 automation action per second—that's just incredible, and a great demonstration of how the platform does what it needs to for the good of our customers.

Yelton: Moving to Ansible Automation Platform has allowed the infrastructure team to concentrate on the business value of using the tools. Our time is now best spent in bringing the art of the possible to other automators across the business and making sure that our work stands as an example of best practice. We’ve also established a community of practice for all automators, whether they're experts or beginners, to collaborate on a consistent platform that can deliver client results.

Yelton: Our clients see the impact in a number of ways, whether it's remediation, patching, or enhancements to make sure that associates can deal with tickets as quickly and as efficiently as possible—including some fully automated remediations. It's also allowed us to surface new capabilities; we have clients with mainframes that can now request jobs to be restarted from their native systems. Ansible Automation Platform delivers that difference: we’ve been able to turn a 30-minute task into a 2.5-minute task with no hands-on involvement.

Yelton: I can only see automation expanding at Ensono. We're always developing the platform to generate more savings, because who wouldn’t? We also see more opportunities to accelerate our speed of service, and strengthen the security postures of our applications and those of our clients. 

We've used Event-Driven Ansible on a few different proofs of concept, and I'm really keen to see where that can take us. Obviously, coupling with AI technologies as they become available will also be an important part of our automation strategy. I see them as 2 waves of the same event; AI and automation are both there to support and augment.

Yelton: The key takeaways are to define your source of truth, know where your inventories are coming from, and know where your secrets will be stored and how you can reliably access them. From that point on, the Red Hat tools deliver a smooth, consistent migration. And if you already have an established AWX user base, they will be at home very quickly on Ansible Automation Platform. There's nothing to be concerned about there. 

Also, be sure to take full advantage of the whole platform. Ansible Automation Platform is so much more than just the AWX piece. You have private automation hubs, you have the Lightspeed elements, you have Event-Driven Ansible. With the burden of those AWX pieces taken away, you and your teams can focus on getting the most out of the platform.