Mutua Madrileña adopts Red Hat Automation Platform

Mutua Madrileña, Spain’s leading insurer, has more than 60 platforms managed by its middleware department. This environment is complex—especially following multiple mergers and acquisitions—but crucial to support the company’s digital needs. In line with its Digital Transformation plan, the middleware team implemented Dynatrace for intelligent observability and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. This allowed the team to automate platform provisioning and accelerate incident resolution using event-driven automation. This standard, automated process can be replicated in any environment to accelerate time to market, reduce operating costs, and free up skilled workers to focus on innovation.

Benefits: 

• Standardized automation procedures and repeatable provisioning framework
• Increased agility of development teams through DevOps and operational self-service tools
• Reduced or eliminated platform downtime through event-driven automation
• Reduced operational costs

Founded in 1930, Mutua Madrileña is a leading insurance company in Spain and Latin America. The company has grown through mergers and acquisitions, accumulating and supporting several platforms and integrations, which resulted in a complex IT environment. 

In 2016, Mutua Madrileña launched a digital transformation strategy. “Our digital transformation introduced many new platforms and technologies. We needed to find a way to manage our environment better as we scaled from 28 platforms to more than 60,” said Marta Ceciliano, Head of Middleware, Automation, and Observability at Mutua Madrileña. 

Managing this environment manually was time-consuming and increased the risk of operational errors. The middleware team decided to turn this challenge into the opportunity to adapt its processes, redefine platform lifecycle stages, and maximize the use of automation.

Mutua Madrileña decided to embed automation into every project on its roadmap, analyzing where it could improve existing manual processes. These mandatory automation processes help to provision platforms, from the creation of business recovery plan environments—unique repositories containing platform configuration data vulnerabilities, and monitoring the platform, installing fixes, and supporting application life cycle management during continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). The team also adopted GitOps to centralize provisioning, operation, and platform maintenance into a single source of truth. 

“By adding an automation stage early in the platform development life cycle, we’ve significantly improved velocity rather than this extra step slowing things down,” said Ceciliano.

During any transformation, it is important to not only innovate but to measure the impact of changes to make sure they offer a good return on investment and assess whether they could be more widely used across the company. 

When Mutua Madrileña saw the benefits of using automation, it decided to expand the scope of automation and look for a tool to automate almost anything using application programming interfaces (APIs). 

“Choosing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in 2016 was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made, and we’d make the same choice again,” said Ceciliano. “We’ve also integrated intelligent observability from Dynatrace, which uses AI to proactively identify any unusual patterns in our environment before triggering Event-Driven Ansible to resolve the incident and enable application recovery,” said Ceciliano. “Combining observability with self-healing has improved resolution times and reduced service downtime. We saw a 50% reduction in service tickets.”

The company is using features such as intelligent log management, which monitors both the server and application logs. If a capacity error is detected, alerts are generated and then the issues on the applications or platforms are addressed automatically through Event-Driven Ansible.

Standardized processes to accelerate time to market 

Mutua Madrileña differentiates itself by releasing new, competitive features to external customers. Thanks to its unified automation framework, standard development methodologies, and in-house knowledge, it can now provision new platforms in different environments quickly with the correct configuration automatically applied. These can then be customized without losing any functionality. This not only helps to speed up the time to market for new developments, but it also means the company can spin up a new environment quickly in response to a disaster.

Increased agility of development teams with DevOps 

Ease of deployment is crucial for both accelerating time to market and giving the company greater control over the platform. This helps to improve incident response times for development teams. The middleware team can offer development teams—that know their applications well—the ability to operate the platform in a controlled manner, resulting in better response time to any incident or unwanted condition.

Reduced or eliminated platform downtime with self-healing 

The Dynatrace intelligent engine uses AI to detect any unusual application activity or behavior and triggers an automated Event-Driven Ansible workflow to fix the issue. This made it possible to eliminate or reduce the impact of known errors while applications are active.

Reduced operating costs 

Mutua Madrileña employs highly qualified technicians, and automating repetitive tasks frees them up for more valuable activities. This helps to reduce operating costs and allows staff to spend more time designing and implementing innovative solutions in line with strategic initiatives.

Following these impressive results, Ceciliano’s team is on a mission to maximize the potential of automation, embedding it into all the company’s systems and launching new services with automation and observability as standard. 

“We started as a middleware team using automation to solve a specific need, but there are many processes that could benefit from it,” said Ceciliano. “We launched a self-service catalog to allow other departments to operate platforms in a controlled and audited way. We want to extend that catalog to other infrastructure areas, or even different departments. We’ve improved execution times and sped up cross-team collaboration to perform tasks. We also want automation to be mandatory for all new projects, including making it an integral part of older platforms.”

Mutua Madrileña is also launching a Transversal Observability initiative to expand its observability and self-healing methodology so other departments and platforms can also benefit from the experience of the middleware team. 

“Having Red Hat by our side gives us the confidence and peace of mind that we are on the right path. We have a mutually beneficial relationship, because we get to know about the latest products and Red Hat learns about our environment,” said Ceciliano. “This gives the Red Hat team firsthand experience of their product in the real world to help develop new use cases and functionality and to identify areas for improvement.”