USDA cut server provisioning from three weeks to 30 minutes

Overview

The National Information Technology Center (NITC) sits in USDA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer. It began as a mainframe shop and grew into a managed hosting provider for programs across the department. Its virtualization and cloud platforms kept up with that growth. The work around them did not, and VM and cloud service requests still ran through documents and spreadsheets.

NITC has now run on Kinetic for nearly 10 years.

How a VM request used to work

Every new virtual machine was built, configured and checked by hand. Requests and their status lived in documents and spreadsheets. Because nothing connected the platforms, staff updated each system of record separately, the CMDB included. Onboarding a new customer meant bringing in professional services.

A developer waited three weeks for a server.

The problems behind that wait:

• Manual work on every request. VM management and provisioning took extensive manual effort, and there was no standard process for a service request.
• No bridge between systems. The platforms were disconnected, and the CMDB could not be integrated, so every change meant updates by hand.
• A previous tool that took too long and did too little. It took more than a year to get started, professional services consumed a large part of the budget, and it supported only a handful of systems.

What NITC built

NITC left its infrastructure where it was and built a self-service catalog on Kinetic in front of it.

• One interface for cloud services. Staff request VMs and cloud services through self-service forms with validation built in, and they can see each request’s status as it moves.
• Provisioning from templates. Workflows provision and configure each VM from a template, so every request follows the same standard steps.
• Direct connections to the systems NITC already runs. Kinetic reads from and writes to Infoblox, the CMDB, Active Directory and vSphere, plus Azure for public cloud, all through their APIs. That work happens in Kinetic’s Integration layer.

NITC’s team built and demonstrated a proof of concept in four days. With the previous solution, getting started had taken more than a year.

Results

• Server provisioning fell from 3 weeks to 30 minutes.
• More than 75% of business and service functions are automated, by USDA’s own count.
• Four days to a working proof of concept, against more than a year just to get started with the previous solution.
• Less reliance on professional services. NITC’s teams now manage their own processes.
• Nearly 10 years on Kinetic. In Rich Barr’s words, the business “could not run without it.”

Why NITC chose to build on top

vSphere, Azure, Active Directory, Infoblox and the CMDB were each doing their job. The trouble sat between them, in the handoffs and spreadsheets. NITC had already tried a tool that took a year to stand up and reached only a few systems. Kinetic connected to the platforms NITC already ran, so the team could fix the process without touching the infrastructure that programs across USDA depend on.

Before and after

	Before	After
Provisioning time	3 weeks	30 minutes
How requests arrive	Documents and spreadsheets	Self-service catalog
Who does the work	IT staff, by hand, for every request	Workflows that run from templates
System updates	Manual, one system at a time	Direct connections to Infoblox, the CMDB, Active Directory, vSphere and Azure
Service automation	Mostly manual	More than 75% automated
Time to get started	More than a year with the previous solution	4 days to build and demonstrate a proof of concept

What you can build next

NITC started with VM provisioning. Other service requests can reuse the workflows and connections it built for that.

• Federal and defense workflow orchestration shows how agencies and commands run cross-system processes on Kinetic, which is deployed in DoD IL5 environments.
• A service management front door above ServiceNow and BMC covers IT and shared-service requests that need one portal across several back-end systems.