Taking on a firewall process
One process Ørsted initially targeted for automation was firewall rule management. In the past, an internal customer submitted a firewall request through ServiceNow, and a network security engineer reviewed the request, checking IP addresses, fully qualified domain names, and directory groups. Depending on the type, the request was then sent to the change advisory board (CAB) for approval. Once validation and approvals were complete, another team implemented the rule on the firewall.
The process involved many teams, and if a problem was discovered at any stage, the request would be sent back to the customer for revisions. Then the review process began again, Soares explains. “This sort of loop could happen across days, weeks,” Soares says. “All this process was just very tedious.”
The teams involved were already at capacity, and streamlining the existing process could only go so far. Engineers would still need to validate incoming requests, and many of those checks could be performed automatically. “A lot of the validations we were doing was something that a machine could do much better than us,” he says.
