VMWARE CASE STUDY

Skipton Building Society diminishesdevelopment time with VMware

Skipton Building Society needed to build an agile CUSTOMER infrastructure so its test and development team could bring Skipton Building Society the company’s latest products and services to market faster than competitors. In an industry handling sensitive fi nancial WEB SITE data, this speed needs to be met with security. With a high www.skipton.co.uk degree of automation from VMware vRealize Automation, new

INDUSTRY applications can be developed on a completely secure and Finance regulation-compliant platform and don’t need to go through internal approvals, meaning some of the Building Society’s new LOCATION services can get to customers up to a month faster than before. Skipton, Yorkshire, United Kingdom Skipton Building Society is a fi nancial institution owned by its members and with a focus on of ering mortgage and savings accounts. The society, based in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, is more than 160 years old and has a network of 95 branches across the UK. It KEY CHALLENGES currently has over 750,000 members with group assets of £13.9 billion. • Improve time to market • Adhere to fi nance industry The Challenge the members’ money we’re spending,” regulations As a fi nancial institution owned by its said Donovan. members, building strong customer • Run estate cost-ef ectively Being fast to market with any service, relationships is vital to Skipton Building for example a new savings account, Society as it develops, launches and meant Skipton’s test and development SOLUTION grows new services. team need to be really agile. But, due VMware vRealize Automation Of ering a range of products from to the sensitive nature of the fi nancial and NSX met Skipton’s key mortgages through to savings accounts, data the organisation handles, all requirement of automating the Building Society is, according to Ged products also need to be developed in a the creation of new, industry- Donovan, Architecture and Solutions secure environment that complies with compliant servers to make the Manager, Skipton Building Society, regulations from the Financial Conduct test and development team “One of the best kept secrets in the UK Authority (FCA) in the UK. Unfortunately, more agile. fi nance market”. Yet it is focused on its existing infrastructure just couldn’t growth. In order to do so, a key part of guarantee speed with this security factored in. It wouldn’t take long to build BUSINESS BENEFITS its competitive strategy - and therefore IT - is to improve time-to-market on all its a server to develop a new product, but it • Increased customer propositions, inspiring members to tell could take up to a month to make it live. satisfaction and more people about the great experience As each new server would be developed competitiveness with Skipton of ers - and encouraging them to with its own specifi cations from scratch, increased time to market also join. it would need to pass a lengthy internal approval and verifi cation process via the • Enhanced innovation while “We constantly look to align our IT security and IT teams before it could be keeping costs fl at initiatives closely to the business strategy. used. • Completely secure, industry- That means using technology to ef ect “Our test and development team would compliant infrastructure speed of change and of er customers updates on existing services as well as build new products, but were left latest services, but we have to do that frustrated at the time it would take to while keeping costs down – after all, it’s bring them to market,” explains Donovan. “Our teams are highly skilled, but we’re all VMWARE CASE STUDY

human and that can mean inconsistencies a fully Software-Defi ned Data Center – “Pace of change is vital for us or even small mistakes being made, so giving us an automated, resilient, agile to remain competitive and the servers did have to be checked and and secure infrastructure in one.” automating with vRealize has verifi ed internally, which takes time. While made us significantly more imperative, it did leave us open to the Business Results & Benefi ts agile. With the software- competition bringing a new product to defined approach from market fi rst.” VMware making the test and vCloud Suite has given Skipton the development team quicker to The Solution fully automated, yet secure and agile environment it wanted to achieve. bring products to market, we Skipton wanted to get to a point where vRealize Automation paired with VMware can launch new products and the test and development team could services, as well as the best NSX for built-in network and security react to customer requirements as rates, to our customers far means the development team will be quickly as possible, so started looking more quickly, so they can be able to self-provision new servers at will for a solution that could automate the reassured they chose the right and at speed via a pre-approved service server creation process, letting the institution to invest with.” catalogue. development team spin up environments Ged Donovan, Architecture and Solutions as and when they wanted. Additionally, The automated, catalogue approach Manager, Skipton Building Society there had to be a guarantee for the IT to creating new servers means the and security teams that each new server IT and security teams have technical would be fully compliant with fi nancial consistency and are always guaranteed industry regulations. Having consolidated each new environment meets all FCA its estate by virtualizing with VMware regulations and compliance laws, so vSphere, the infrastructure team had they don’t need to spend time manually not only driven signifi cant cost savings, confi guring settings on them individually but achieved greater management and when they are created. Eliminating that control of its estate. The team therefore internal process alone means the test and wanted to expand on its approach and development team can start spinning up knew a move to a fully software-defi ned additional infrastructure resource, for environment with automation at its heart, peak periods such as ISA season as soon would enable new environments could be as they want to get started, with a new spun up faster. platform now deployed in just 1.5 hours, reducing the time to market on software With these requirements in mind, updates and handling regulatory Skipton’s infrastructure team went changes, bring them to Skipton’s through a competitive RFP process, customers weeks – or even months – considering Cisco and Microsoft’s cloud faster. solutions alongside VMware’s vCloud Suite. “Pace of change is vital for us to remain competitive and the ability to automate “vRealize Automation, part of the new servers will make us signifi cantly VMware vCloud Suite, had the level of more agile. Our platforms might start automation we needed, so we could give in the test and development phase, developers a service catalogue to choose but they don’t just stop there, they from when provisioning new servers, go into production eventually and, while the Site Recovery Manager product with VMware, will be rolled out much of ered us automated disaster recovery quicker than before. Bringing products to keep the infrastructure up and running to market quicker will help us of er the at all times,” explained Donovan. “The latest products and best rates to our much needed security aspect is taken customers, so they can be reassured they care of through the micro-segmentation chose the right institution to invest with,” approach including network virtualization says Donovan. with VMware NSX. As NSX adds security directly to the workload, when a server is “VMware has also helped us future-proof, created to support a new application, its keeping us ahead of the known - and policies are automatically attached to it. unknown - competition. Our immediate Ultimately, we felt VMware’s suite was the competitors might be other building most complete set of products, with the societies or banks at the moment, but network virtualization of ered through the market is constantly changing, NSX meaning VMware could truly of er particularly with the rise of more and

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY / 2 VMWARE CASE STUDY

more online digital services, and other Regulations (GDPR) coming into force “We constantly look to align competitors could come from any other in 2018, this approach will be invaluable. our IT initiatives closely to the industry.” As Donovan explains, “Meeting data protection regulations, such as the business strategy. That means As well as agility and better time to new GDPR, is a constant consideration. using technology to effect market, vRealize Automation is also Being able to segment, prevent and load speed of change and offer central to the organisation becoming balance right by the server with VMware customers updates on existing more innovative. As the test and services as well as latest NSX makes everything far more secure, development team is able to easily spin services, but we have to do so we can continue to safely build out our up new environments, there’s more room that while keeping costs down, environment, safe in the knowledge that for trial and error - with less resource or which VMware will enable us we’re compliant and protected from our time invested if a new project doesn’t to do.” core, even as regulations change.” work out exactly as planned. “This Ged Donovan, Architecture and Solutions freedom means the team can be more Manager, Skipton Building Society innovative in their development, taking risks with new ideas to operate more ef ciently, rather than being constrained by process,” said Donovan.

Meanwhile, an added bonus of deploying VMWARE FOOTPRINT the vCloud Suite for Skipton Building • VMware vCloud Suite Society is VMware Site Recovery Manager • VMware NSX (SRM). Not only can the organisation bring products to market faster and keep • VMware vSphere costs fl at, but the reliability of its systems • VMware vRealize has improved. As part of a project • Site Recovery Manager focused on the stability of the IT estate, which has seen SRM deployed alongside Microsoft Clustering technology, Skipton’s APPLICATIONS VIRTUALIZED IT team can guarantee the servers on • Test and Development its systems can be back up and running • Exchange within hours of an outage, whereas it • HR system would take weeks to get some secondary systems, such as the HR application, back • Document Management up and running before. • Accountancy Looking Ahead PARTNER In the future, the IT team wants to • Arrow make use of VMware’s Showback and Chargeback products. “We want to do more work into understanding how we can get the best value from what can be expensive resources,” explains Donovan. “As it’s our customers’ money, we want to show we’re ef ective at managing costs and operate as ef ciently as possible. A clearer view of our estate will mean we can keep costs fl at, but operate more ef ectively, so we’re able to do more with what we have. That could mean anything from switching of unused IT resource out of hours through to closing down unused web services.”

Finally, the organisation is looking to use micro-segmentation across all of its environment and blueprints. With the new European General Data Protection

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com Copyright © 2016 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: 16Q2 Skipton UK