Asian Development Bank saves hundreds of hours in infrastructure management with Red Hat automation

Asian Development Bank (ADB)

Asian Development Bank (ADB) saves hundreds of work hours each year by running Red Hat’s automation software in a managed cloud environment.

ADB works to eradicate extreme poverty in the Asia-Pacific region with loans, grants, equity investments, and technical assistance. Effective disaster recovery is key to ADB’s operations. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, ADB committed more than US$30 billion in loans and budget support for vaccine purchasing and other healthcare needs.

The COVID-19 pandemic helped ADB recognize that they needed to modernize, standardize, and automate their operations to meet the increasing demand for their services. The company searched for a solution that would allow them to sustain operations throughout the pandemic—and face future challenges, such as natural disasters or other business disruptors.

To provide reliable social and economic development support to their region, ADB required a shift from paper-based, manual tasks to digital, automated processes, backed by cloud-native resiliency.

ADB’s search for a solution to help keep IT and business operations running during operational changes led them to Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform.

Ansible Automation Platform provides reusable, user-friendly playbooks, templated jobs, and workflows to help organizations automate routine manual tasks into efficient, centralized execution environments. Choosing to provision Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure also offered ADB the benefits of easily scalable cloud infrastructure.

Replacing manual processes from infrastructure management with Ansible Playbooks and Red Hat Ansible Certified Content helped ADB adopt an infrastructure approach where new virtual servers are provisioned if modifications are needed, rather than modifying existing servers. As a result, the organization can prevent performance or security issues due to human error from adjustments to live servers.

ADB worked closely with Red Hat Consulting during several Services Discovery Sessions to identify, prioritize, and plan use cases for its new automation technology.

Software and Services

• Red Hat Consulting
• Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform

Now, with its streamlined infrastructure, ADB is more nimble and efficient. With Ansible Automation Platform, the organization significantly reduced the time needed to complete provisioning, patching, and other infrastructure management tasks.

Previously, database cloning required 3 different teams to coordinate for 6-8 hours each Saturday. Now, that same process takes half the time and can be completed automatically, eliminating manual work on the weekend. This automation alone saves ADB 100 work days each year. The organization also saves an additional 20 work days each month with automated patching processes and approximately 2 hours per incident with automated data recovery.

Automated monitoring, patching, and remediation help protect ADB’s IT environments and resources from vulnerabilities and human errors. As a result, their IT teams can focus on building and delivering innovative, user-friendly digital services.

Because of ADB’s initial success with Red Hat technology, more teams across the organization are adopting a central, automated approach to critical processes. In addition, the IT team is evaluating how Ansible Automation Platform can support additional organization-wide use cases, such as managing configuration drift for monitoring agents across thousands of servers and network devices.

IT department work, which used to take months, now only takes days. The time saved allows the team to focus on more valuable, innovative projects, like building new services and working more independently.