In the course of less than a decade, online banking has taken off, now growing at a rate of about 27 percent per year. This is not surprising, given that it provides a more convenient option for customers and is a cost-saving move for financial institutions.
CashEdge has assisted financial transactions for institutions such as Bank of America, Citibank and Wachovia since 1999. As the online banking trend has grown, so has CashEdge.
The company’s rapid growth, combined with its multiple locations, has presented a challenge for its IT team when it comes to user provisioning. CashEdge maintains multiple servers for both Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange in multiple locations. In addition, CashEdge’s security and compliance regulations mandate the strict enforcement of IT policies and require the necessary audit trails across the entire infrastructure. As a result, CashEdge was forced to limit user-provisioning tasks to only a few individuals despite the use of scripts.
Much of the burden fell to David Truong, senior systems engineer, who manages change-control needs, such as password resets, mobile device access and user provisioning. Because CashEdge’s help desk received 20 to 30 tickets per day for each of its three locations, this equated to roughly three hours per day just handling those requests. The manual process also affected productivity, since employees were required to wait, on average, half a day before receiving a response.
In an effort to automate tasks, such as setting up new users, Truong manually wrote and ran a variety of scripts. Each script had to be individually tested and launched for every instance on every server in every location. Once approved, each script had to be copied and verified on the target server where it would run. Manually performing the administrative tasks was error prone and lacked the necessary audit trail required by corporate compliance…