Micro Focus
Case study

IT managed services company provides agile, secure cloud services using Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management and Amazon Web Services

US-based Greenlight Group is a software consulting, systems integration services, and managed services company specializing in enterprise IT operations management software. As a trusted IT partner, Greenlight helps its customers grow and adopt to business needs by offering subscription-based IT operations management capabilities hosted in secure hybrid cloud infrastructure.

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Greenlight Group

Industry

Software & Technology

Location

Utah, United States

Product

Challenge

Providing agile, secure cloud managed services was an arduous affair. It meant complicated, manual, and error-prone hands-on work. Heavy reliance on experienced IT engineers took time away from customer engagement and directly impacted revenue. With long delivery times, expansion to new businesses was nearly impossible.

“It was complicated and manual, with all the server and network configurations, taking us up to two days to properly provision an AWS environment,” says Joe Madden, CEO of Greenlight. “The quality of the builds was always in suspicion, as we found errors. We couldn’t easily spin up new environments for our customers.”

Solution

At Greenlight, cloud choice is a customer choice. A flexible tool was needed to allow customers to design their own hybrid environment. Greenlight selected Hybrid Cloud Management (HCM), built on a containerized microservices platform, to run its cloud managed services. The benefits were clear to Joe: “With HCM, we like to tell our customers, ‘We can run on any public cloud, on premise, or legacy VM.’ We present the choice of clouds, based on a SaaS pricing model. This is the total advantage HCM has – it’s vendor and cloud agnostic.”

Joe continues, “HCM is the platform to build out the IT Ops automation strategy. It’s a solid, modern platform, with cloud service automation and operations orchestration functions as the underlying components. We design the builds exactly as we want them, using the simple orchestration designer in the HCM UI, without having to write scripts or hack XML/ Ruby files. And with built-in orchestration, we can integrate processes that include universal discovery, monitoring, incident remediation, and backup.”

Today, Greenlight uses HCM service catalog to quickly provision the right environment for customers, for any choice of hybrid cloud. The orchestration engine, Operations Orchestration, takes care of the predesigned pre and post provisioning configurations. Joe says, “We leverage HCM to expand capacity in a consistent manner that allows us to be operationally effective.”

When AWS is the cloud platform, Greenlight taps into more than twenty services – from Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to Storage (S3), from Relational Database Service (RDS) to Identity Access Management (IAM), from Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to Cloudtrail, and more.

Joe adds, “AWS offers a mature, cutting-edge cloud platform. Rich set of stable APIs, breadth of offerings, ability to provision only what customers need, scalability on demand, security, it’s all there. We extensively leverage the AWS security framework to ensure our customers’ clouds have the highest amount of security and access control.”

“There are unlimited possibilities when HCM and AWS come together,” concludes Joe. “Combined, they’ve helped us achieve automated cloud service delivery that is agile, secure, and efficient.”

Results

Automating its cloud managed services with HCM and Amazon Web Services, Greenlight achieved multiple benefits. Two of the most significant benefits have been the complete automation of cloud provisioning and subsequent time savings. Joe says, “What could take up to two days to configure is down to twenty minutes. We’re easily saving hundreds of hours per month.”

Now, experienced engineers have time to focus on innovation and increase customer engagement. According to Joe, business growth has been phenomenal, “We’ve created a pipeline of customers which would’ve been impossible to achieve without automation.”

And all of this is attained in an agile manner. Explains Joe, “We’ve achieved an entire value stream in our continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) process. We spin up and spin down services, build and destroy, as required by our customer engagement projects.”

As Greenlight continues to evolve its cloud managed services, it will bring higher levels of automation using Micro Focus ITOM products, extending services to capabilities that include universal discovery expansion, service management, monitoring integration, and backup automation.

One thing for sure, HCM and AWS will be in the mix.

How can Micro Focus help you to succeed?

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Greenlight Group case study

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release-rel-2020-10-1-5313 | Wed Oct 14 18:06:08 PDT 2020
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release/rel-2020-10-1-5313
Wed Oct 14 18:06:08 PDT 2020