Your browser is not supported

For the best experience, use Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

CenturyLink

Global communications, network, hosting, cloud, and IT services company liberates staff by automating tasks and routine systems management while supporting business operations.

Outcomes

+ Automates repetitive, time-consuming tasks, saving a massive amount of man hours and allowing deployment of staff to higher-value tasks
+ Provides comprehensive, accurate automated accounting of enterprise software assets and licensing status that streamlines audit reporting
+ Delivers thorough understanding of network and server use patterns with automated reporting that identifies who uses which server. Users can be warned of scheduled interruptions, decreasing user frustration while lowering administrative overhead

Challenge

Century Link needed to shift engineering focus into creative, high-value tasks, vs. tedious, repetitive operations.

CenturyLink is in a market with high competitive pressures, and it needs engineers focused on creative, high-value tasks, not burdened with tedious, repetitious operations. Moore’s organization, the Managed Services Tools Engineering team, features content experts in the tools and automation platform for the entire organization. Internal users – such as operations or engineering – or external customers come to him with use cases they want to automate. Moore and his staff identify the best prospects for automation and what tools to use to implement the automation. The team does the automation programming themselves or mentors the users to do it themselves. Their platform includes a diverse set of tools, but the tools are the highlight and the core of managed services. Out of the box, the Micro Focus software tools provide high-level functionality and the tools to make business decisions. Micro Focus Server Automation and Micro Focus Network Automation provide all the data for the CMDB (Configuration Management Data Base), improving the quality of the data.

Details

About Century Link

CenturyLink is a global communications, network, hosting, cloud and IT services company with 43,000 employees. CenturyLink offers network and data systems management, big data analytics and IT consulting, and operates more than 55 data centers in North America, Europe and Asia. The company provides broadband, voice, video, data and managed services over a robust 250,000-route-mile U.S. fiber network and a 300,000-route-mile international transport network.

Solution

Riverturn and Georgia IT help CenturyLink staff integrate Micro Focus products with other internal products. As partners, Riverturn and Georgia IT may do the development, or they may mentor, guiding in techniques, approaches and best practices.

Micro Focus solutions allow for phased delivery and the expansion of solutions. Particularly in situations where the stakes are high – such as when PCI or SOX compliance needs to be maintained or when dealing with security – managers may need time to develop trust before allowing mission-critical functions to be automated. Or, it can be an iterative process to learn what can most productively be automated. Because the Micro Focus tools allow applications to be built in layers, staff can take an agile, incremental approach, providing the level of automation that the end-user is comfortable with, and then later, as confidence and knowledge increase, add further capabilities.

Results

Using Micro Focus, CenturyLink realized the following benefits:

  • Automates repetitive, time-consuming tasks, saving a massive amount of man hours and allowing deployment of staff to higher-value tasks
  • Provides comprehensive, accurate automated accounting of enterprise software assets and licensing status that streamlines audit reporting
  • Delivers thorough understanding of network and server use patterns with automated reporting that identifies who uses which server. Users can be warned of scheduled interruptions, decreasing user frustration while lowering administrative overhead
  • Automates server patching (Windows, Solaris, Linux), reducing staff dedicated to the task from 12 full-time engineers to one, with a goal of completely automating the process to increase efficiency while ensuring compliance with SLAs (service level agreements)
  • Helps maintain PCI compliance and enables smoother implementation of firewall changes to save significant dollars of time spent
  • Standardizes configurations across the enterprise, simplifying management and control
  • Records and restores network device configurations, getting devices back online in minutes instead of hours
  • Supplies automated triage and expanded reporting on server alerts to provide engineers with the data they will need to resolve any issues

Related Stories

release-rel-2022-8-1-7822 | Wed Aug 3 16:06:55 PDT 2022
7822
release/rel-2022-8-1-7822
Wed Aug 3 16:06:55 PDT 2022
AWS