Working with tools that are not closely connected and integrated can lead to problems such as siloed information and poor visibility.
Cutover integrations allow our clients to extend the value of all their existing tools and bring all their organization’s data onto one platform, automate time-consuming, manual tasks, move from human-by-default to human-by-exception through automation, and gain visibility of everything going on across the enterprise. Here are just a few examples of how our clients are using integrations to improve their release and resilience activities.
ServiceNow and other CMDB integrations
A British multinational investment bank was using ServiceNow as its Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to store service and application data. The team was also using Cutover for its resilience activity, storing service recovery plans for each service or application. This included details about the service itself and how to recover it in the event of a disaster.
The bank needed to bring in certain pieces of data from ServiceNow to augment the information in Cutover, such as the name of the service, categorization in terms of criticality, and other core information about the service.
The integration between Cutover and ServiceNow creates a regular feed of data into Cutover, allowing users to filter and drill down into information that’s in ServiceNow without leaving the runbook they are working on.
Benefits
Without an integration, it would have taken additional time and constant effort to maintain the right data in Cutover, making time to value much slower. Now, if someone wants to add additional pieces of information into a service recovery plan it is simple to add in and displays immediately in the runbook. This integration provided value from day one, but will increasingly create more benefits as time goes on and it is used more widely.
An American multinational investment bank had a similar need to integrate its internally-built CMDB with Cutover. Its own system is used as an asset inventory and sends a feed of data to Cutover on a regular basis via the integration. Admins only have to update the central data source and it is automatically made readily available for Cutover users.
Integrations with enterprise tools to enable resilience testing
A British mutual financial institution needed to improve its resilience testing, as its existing process required people to be involved at every step and it was taking much longer than necessary. The financial institution wanted to take the human element out of certain aspects of the process and reduce the timeline significantly.
To enable this, they integrated a host of tools with Cutover including Ansible and Interlink, and are increasing their integrations with the addition of other tools such as ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams. Using these integrations instead of relying on manual effort helps to reduce risk and the chances of human error, while also making the overall process much quicker and more seamless.
Remedy integration for change events
An American multinational investment bank was using IT Service Management tool, BMC Remedy, as its ITIL change management system of record, while planning and orchestrating the actual changes in outside systems. The bank wanted to streamline the change management process to minimize the number of systems being used, improve quality and accuracy, and automate manual processes.
The existing process involved creating and approving change tickets in BMC Remedy. Then, while orchestrating the change through Cutover, the change coordinator would simultaneously log in to Remedy to manually update the change tickets and push them to different stages. These tickets also had to be closed out at the end of the change event with sufficient evidence and failing to do so within a certain time frame would result in a bank change violation. Some events had up to 50 different associated change tickets with different change windows, creating a huge administrative burden on top of the work to successfully complete the change itself.
Since the bank was already using Cutover to plan and orchestrate its change events, they wanted to streamline the change process. By integrating with Cutover, change coordinators can query, push, and close Remedy change tickets through the Cutover interface where they’re executing the event.
Cutover’s integration with Remedy provides a new panel in Cutover for querying ticket numbers, surfacing relevant change information, and allowing change coordinators to move tickets forward while ticking off a runbook throughout the event. By enabling users to progress and close tickets in the same platform they are using to manage the actual event, the automation with Remedy means that tickets are updated in real time and never get missed.
This integration has been especially useful in mitigating violations and improving accuracy for events with multiple changes across a weekend, where a large number of change tickets need to be managed.
Automation as a Service and internal planning tools for data center migrations
An American multinational investment bank was using Automation as a Service (AaaS) as its primary automation tool. Integrating this with Cutover allows users to build AaaS automated tasks into their Cutover runbooks, by selecting the parameters during the planning phase. During the live run, the AaaS tasks will auto-start and finish based on the result of the automation. AaaS tasks can be “re-fired” as many times as required directly from Cutover.
The bank is automating more and more of its work utilizing AaaS. The majority of change executed in the bank now involves automation in some form, so having the ability to combine automated and human tasks allows Cutover to act as the orchestrator for the full activity set, combining all activity with automated communications and reporting.
This same bank also integrated Cutover with its internal Data Center Migration planning tool. The integration syncs the data in real time between the planning tool and Cutover’s event roadmap, along with various associated metadata to utilize in Cutover runbooks.
Management and application teams can now visualize the plan in real time and use Cutover templates to build standardized migration plans and track progress each weekend on a single dashboard. Cutover runbook completion data is passed back to the golden source planning tool for reporting.
