Global Technology Company Standardizes on BackBox Automation to Scale Services
Leading managed service provider saves time managing multiple vendors while improving and expanding customer offerings that drive revenue.
Challenge
Organizations around the world rely on this global technology company to manage their network and security devices and prevent configuration drift. Over the years, the company worked with several different automation solution providers that failed to meet their requirements. They either fell short in their advertised features, were unable to deliver mutually agreed upon roadmap items, or were unable to scale their product, services, and support to keep pace with the tech company’s growth.
Between the sprawl of vendor tools in their network and feature overlap, the company’s network management team was spending much of their time reacting to patching and repairing and investigating configuration drift. The frequency of time-consuming and disruptive fire drills – which often occurred on weekends and evenings – prevented the team from taking on more strategic tasks and led to missed expectations and frustration of their managed customers and internal teams.
Their frustration with the current vendor forced the company to decide whether to develop their own solution internally or try once again to find an automation solution provider that could meet their requirements. Considering the time and skills required to build and maintain even just a set of baseline automations, the company opted to take a fresh look at the network automation market and discovered BackBox.
Solution
In 2022, after an accelerated but rigorous evaluation process and due diligence to validate BackBox’s top customer satisfaction ratings with several references, the global tech company selected BackBox as their network automation vendor. BackBox was able to meet their key requirements including:
Quick deployment to improve service delivery and customer satisfaction
Out-of-the-box automations to support dozens of network and security device vendors and enhance team productivity
API-driven features that simplify integration with systems across their complex, distributed environment
Within 30 days, the global technology company was able to deploy BackBox into their managed services portfolio offerings. The company prioritized three automation use cases: device discovery and onboarding, backup and restore, and configuration management.
We have a unique environment that limits the tools we can deploy successfully in our network. BackBox provides capabilities that are key for us to scale, including a combination of out-of-the box solutions that help us accomplish many of the automation capabilities we need, API-driven features to customize and automate workflows for our environment with no scripting, and the ability to quickly deploy.
–VP Managed Services
Automated Device Discovery & Onboarding
Prior to BackBox, it would take the team countless hours to manually add devices, correct for human errors, and create internal tickets to work on firewalls, switches, routers, and IDS/IPS devices. With BackBox out-of-the-box automations, device discovery and onboarding happens in minutes, not days. Over 4,000 customer devices were added in less than a month to their management ecosystem. On an ongoing basis, dynamic tracking of device additions, moves, and changes mitigates potential risk, increases accuracy, reduces errors, and frees up more time to focus on additional, billable managed service offerings that lead to revenue growth.
Backup and Restore
The team utilizes BackBox to automate backups reliably and easily based on schedules the team sets and that work for their customers. A process that used to happen every night and required a network administrator’s time, now happens automatically and the team receives a report showing the backup is complete that they can share with their customers. The ability to capture backups and gather data that can be shared with other internal reporting systems via API integration ensures confidence that the services required by their customers are being fulfilled. Additionally, in case of an outage or in the event the team needs to rollback an automated change that has inadvertently led to a failure, they can now do this confidently and quickly with automated one-click rollback.
Configuration Management
Navigating a diverse range of multi-vendor ecosystems and managing a wide variety of configurations that are already deployed and running in their customers’ production environments was a huge drain on resources and opened the door to configuration drift that on average took two to three hours to investigate. With BackBox, the team now has the foundation in place to conduct compliance audits based on industry standards and internal best practices. BackBox provides them with everything they need to automatically inspect device configurations, identify compliance violations, and remediate or notify of deviations within minutes.
Within the first year of using BackBox to connect, backup, restore, manage configurations, and track access, as well as audit changes made by customer admins, has freed up time so that internal teams can work on expanding service offerings to their customers. Looking to the future, the company is planning to rollout services like compliance management, OS updates and patching, vulnerability management and remediation with capabilities including BackBox’s IntelliChecks, Tasks, and built-in Automation Builder.
BackBox is truly a partner – not a vendor – which is a breath of fresh air. The support is fantastic because they apply the right level of expertise to issues so there’s never any runaround when something needs to be resolved.
–Sr. Network Administrator
Significant ROI
The entire deployment and onboarding of over 200 customers and over 4,000 customer devices occurred in 30 days from initial deployment to service, accelerating time to value. New automation offerings have generated substantial revenue and the opportunity for more incremental revenue from existing customers.
Time Savings from Hours to Minutes - 25x Faster
Instead of two to three hours to investigate instances of configuration drift, BackBox identifies violations in minutes and notifies the team automatically. Additionally, onboarding new customer devices has gone from days to minutes, including success and exception reporting.
Improved Customer Satisfaction at Scale
Automation and reporting lead to instant validation, confidence, and assurance to customers that their devices are managed and maintained, and issues are quickly remediated. With increased competition in the managed services market and growth rates targeted at 25% year-over-year, the team is now confident they can meet internal budget constraints and external revenue target expectations without the need for additional headcount and training.