Visibility and automation enable de Volksbank to streamline IT provisioning

External service relies on internal IT efficiency
With its services, de Volksbank strives for social impact on the climate and good living. Thanks to a personal approach, it has strong customer relationships, pleasant interactions, and suitable propositions.

Together with an ambitious company mission, banking with a human touch, de Volksbank has to comply with the country’s stringent financial service regulations. These two challenges demand pinpoint efficiency, and that relies on effective IT.

de Volksbank needed a unified architecture, without the replacement of existing systems, to allow teams and technology to work in sync from a single source of truth, saving time and money. de Volksbank turned to ServiceNow for the solution. Having previously implemented ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and ServiceNow Integrated Risk Management (IRM) with Vulnerability Response (VR), the bank has taken a further step with the introduction of IT Operations Management (ITOM).

CMDB is a vital central component
The bank’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a crucial component of its IT management landscape. Used to store information about hardware and software assets which support core banking processes and applications, it is vital that this database is constantly updated to give visibility of the bank’s IT environment. The existing CMDB was inaccurate due to the multiple data sources feeding into it and the existence of manual processes which increased costs and impacted services negatively. Now, de Volksbank relies on ServiceNow CMDB Discovery to populate the database and ensure that it is current and reliable.

“A main driver for choosing ServiceNow ITOM was the ability to use Discovery to automatically fill our CMDB and bring about a single source of truth. Also, the use of ServiceNow workflow engine to automate as many of our IT activities as possible,” says Jeroen Jochems, Platform Delivery Manager for ServiceNow at de Volksbank. “In the last two years, we have started building on the quality of the CMDB via all kinds of health rules which help the teams to create their own high-quality content in the CMDB.”

Automation delivers actionable alerts
Another element of ITOM heavily relied on by de Volksbank is Event Management, which supports actionable alerts and incidents. de Volksbank structured a 24x7 monitoring system with set variables that triggers warnings when a system looks likely to fail. With ServiceNow, truly actionable insights are automatically initiated without manually combing through data. de Volksbank moved from a reactive monitoring process to a proactive monitoring process which supports its SLAs around uptimes to customers and financial service regulators.

One tangible advantage of this is that the bank no longer needs engineers on site to provide 24x7 system monitoring. Before ServiceNow, the bank employed a five-strong team to work through the night in case there was a problem. With ServiceNow, instead of staffing and paying engineers overnight, when an issue occurs, the duty engineer is alerted by an automated callout. This has not only decreased operational costs, but it has also increased employee satisfaction, presenting opportunities for more meaningful work.

Many other processes are also automated with ServiceNow ITOM. Apps enable DevOps teams to re-boot and take snapshots of servers. Ordering a new Windows server is an automated process that now takes minutes rather than several days. The bank recently deployed a series of Linux machines, and automatically deployed and configured Puppet on the machines, in one hour. Previously, it would have taken two to three days.

For visibility into infrastructure workloads and vulnerabilities, the bank runs ServiceNow SecOps which leverages the CMDB and ITOM to be more powerful. For example, when a new vulnerability is identified, the IT team can quickly pinpoint the affected devices and automate remediation—all within a single system of action. To further enhance the CMDB, de Volksbank also plans to implement the Common Service Data Model (CSDM), a ServiceNow framework that provides guidance for building out the CMDB with business services in order to execute a faster root cause analysis and better impact analysis, resulting in a reduction in resolution times.

Better customer service and compliance
In addition to monitoring internal IT applications, event monitoring is also used to watch over the core banking and customer-facing applications.

“Even with our extremely complex and critical systems, ServiceNow is key to keeping everything up and running,” says Bas Ridders, ServiceNow Platform Engineer at de Volksbank. “Whether it’s operational system maintenance or proactive notifications of potential issues, the automated processes of ITOM help ensure we deliver high service availability.”

ITOM brings standardization to IT processes at de Volksbank and brings single-pane-of-glass visibility to the data used by several teams, eliminating the inefficiency of combining several systems to gain the same information. This allows teams to focus on their primary activities knowing they will be notified whenever there is a deviation spotted in the system.

However, using ITOM is not purely an inward-facing solution, as Jeroen explains: “End customers receive a solid service because with the Event Management solution we can be more proactive in managing our systems. Our systems have very good uptime and ServiceNow plays an important part in enabling us to serve our customers in the best way we can.”

ServiceNow plays an important part in de Volksbank’s efforts to comply with the stringent Dutch regulations regarding quality and uptime. ServiceNow’s adaptable controls promote compliance within de Volksbank’s native workflows, automating assurance and audit activities.

The partnership of de Volksbank and ServiceNow is an enduring relationship. Jeroen concludes: “The future world for us is one where we will be working more and more on a cloud-based infrastructure. That is going to be a large journey and hopefully we will have ServiceNow to help us manage a hybrid world of cloud and on-prem systems.”

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