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Swiss Re

Here’s How ProGet Empowered Swiss Re to Instantly Deliver Packages to Internally Distributed IT teams and Maintain 100% Consistency Between Servers

Industry: Insurance

Location: Switzerland

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Here’s How ProGet Empowered Swiss Re to Instantly Deliver Packages to Internally Distributed IT teams and Maintain 100% Consistency Between Servers

“With very little effort, I can maintain over a hundred packages with almost no time investment.”

John Rogers, Expert System Engineer, Swiss Re

The Challenge:

Swiss Re is a global risk management and insurance firm headquartered in Switzerland. Its internal Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) team works with internal distributed IT customers across worldwide business units and maintains 4,500+ Windows servers across its many distributed IT teams. All of these teams rely on IaaS to keep their infrastructure up-to-date and secure..

To do that, the IaaS team needed predictable package delivery times, every time. But despite evaluating many different solutions, none of them made it possible to consistently provide fast service across tickets.

Some tools the IaaS team tried lacked critical features, while other free solutions were suffering from sporadic development and lack of focus. Other self-managed solutions required users to use their entire tool suite, also a non-starter.

“With our previous tool, between clicking install and delivery, there was no way to predict when the software would get delivered to the machine. Sometimes it’d be 5 minutes later, sometimes 20 minutes later, sometimes 4 hours later. ProGet allows me to install software on-demand; I issue an install command, and it installs instantly, every time.”

John Rogers, Expert System Engineer, Swiss Re

Moreover, although the IaaS team found Puppet and Chocolatey met all their needs for maintaining their Windows systems and packages configurations, none of the (few) remaining options offered any integrations with them. Ultimately, this left the team with the sole option of dropping the tools they already liked and used – yet another non-starter.

Finally, it was often impossible to confine internal change requests to a single server, which resulted in configuration drift, increased downtime, and additional customer support tickets.

The Solution:

Swiss Re ultimately turned to ProGet as the only solution that could meet all of its needs.

For starters, ProGet offers reliable, instantaneous delivery, which immediately eliminated wait times for packages. It’s also a self-managed repository that doesn’t require servers to have Internet access after initial configuration, which took care of the security risks and connectivity issues.

“In the past, everything was combined, so publishing a software package and installing a software package were intertwined. Now with ProGet, we can completely separate making packages available and their installation, so the customer can decide when to install, regardless of when we publish.“

John Rogers, Expert System Engineer, Swiss Re

ProGet’s integration capabilities gave Swiss Re these benefits without requiring them to change a single thing in the existing processes. An easy-to-use GUI integrated effortlessly with Chocolatey and reduced package installation to a single click. Full control over installations meant internal customers maintained control: they could install on their own timetable, ensuring configuration drift never occurred due to inconsistent changes across servers due to a software update.

“We like that ProGet isn’t static. It gives us the flexibility we need to easily manage hundreds of packages over 20 feeds across six environments.”

John Rogers, Expert System Engineer, Swiss Re

On top of all of this, ProGet’s API makes everything seamless: Internal customers get all the benefits without ever needing to know a single thing about how ProGet works behind the scenes to power the IaaS team’s work.

And last but not least, Swiss Re gets fast, thorough, personalized assistance. Whenever they ask for help, Inedo is ready to provide it—a far cry from the frustrating customer service experience many have come to expect from other companies.

“We’re really happy that every time we have a question, we get an answer from Inedo fast. This was one of the more attractive things about working with a smaller company.“

John Rogers, Expert System Engineer, Swiss Re

Overall Results:

• Instantaneous package delivery
• Complete freedom to use the tools and processes that work for them and their customers
• Total flexibility to support a hybrid cloud environment
• Seamless execution across a large IT department
• Fast, personalized customer support 

Inedo DevOps tools maximize developer time, minimize release risk, and empower stakeholders to bring their vision to life faster. All with the people and technology you have right now.