Mortgage Lender Leverages SovLabs and SolarWinds IP Address Manager to Deliver On-Demand Cloud Responsiveness

Background

With over 20 years of experience and hundreds of thousands of mortgages issued, this leading mortgage originator attributes their success in this highly competitive business to a relentless focus on a customer experience that makes getting a mortgage as simple as possible.

“It’s a race to improve the customer experience. Borrowers realize that there’s not a lot of difference between loan providers on pricing, so they focus on the ease of the loan process and the service they receive.”

The “Services and Programs” group has recently made major investments in cloud infrastructure to enable the agility required to improve the customer experience and speed delivery of new products.

Challenges

Unfortunately, the existing two-day SLA for the network services team to provision new IP addresses and DNS records was a show-stopper for the 24/7 on-demand expectations of the new cloud. Aside from budgetary constraints, the network services team had no way to achieve the cloud’s provision-in-minutes requirements. Furthermore, due to the mission-critical nature of network stability for this internet-facing business, the network services team was unwilling to enable administrative access to network configuration files for the cloud team, either interactively or via scripts.

The cloud program was in danger of never getting off the ground.

Solution

The company was a satisfied user of SolarWinds® IP Address Manager (IPAM), but needed a way to automate the provisioning of IP addresses for virtual machines in the cloud, rather than responding to ticket requests and updating IPAM manually. They found a solution with SovLabs® vRealize Automation Integration Pack, including both the IPAM and DNS modules for vRealize® Automation. These modules integrate directly with SolarWinds IPAM and enable administrators to define policy-driven profiles that help ensure IP addresses and name server records are allocated, validated, documented, and configured appropriately, completely within vRealize Automation.

The company requested a free trial of SovLabs vRealize Automation Integration Pack for SolarWinds and was able to download, install, and begin the evaluation. The network services team quickly developed confidence that they could automate their IPAM policies and DNS configurations, and fully leverage the functionality of SolarWinds IP Address Manager that they had come to rely on.

Results

By leveraging SovLabs framework capabilities, the cloud team delegated IPAM and DNS management privileges to the network services team within vRealize Automation. Using the policies within, the network services team was able to control IP address provisioning and de-provisioning, as well as the creation and removal of DNS records.

Adopting the SovLabs vRealize Automation Integration Pack for SolarWinds allayed network stability concerns and empowered the cloud team to deliver the expected on-demand responsiveness required to support the company’s strategic agility objectives. Costs are reduced, teams are more productive, and services get delivered within minutes of a request.

Additionally, the cloud team leveraged SovLabs’ unique ability to use vRealize Automation metadata to tag additional information with each IP assignment to strengthen tracking and inventory.

Free Trial SovLabs vRealize Automation Integration Pack for SolarWinds