CIL Helps an Irish Bank to Develop AWS Config Integration With ServiceNOW CMDB
About the customer
The Irish Bank is a commercial bank that plays a large role in the Irish banking industry. The Irish Bank is one of the largest financial services groups in Ireland and provides a wide range of banking and financial services. The bank is becoming leaner and more agile with the use of Cloud services, in particular AWS. had both.
The challenge
To meet regulatory requirements, the Irish Bank had to ensure select AWS resources were being tracked in the central CMDB. Due to the tightly micro segmented network, implementing the off-the-shelf solution from ServiceNow (SNOW) which uses a mid-server was not feasible for the bank. As a result a more custom solution was required.
The Solution
Our engineers developed a lean, custom architecture that makes use of several AWS services. When Config generates a report in S3, an ETL lambda is triggered which processes the file, normalizes the data and updates a DynamoDB table. The table has a Stream enabled which triggers another lambda that publishes a data payload to SNOW via a SNS subscription. On SNOW, custom handlers take the data and inserts/updates the data in the CMDB.
The table maintains the state of each resource and ensures only appropriate updates are pushed to SNOW CMDB. The solution updates resources every 6 hours as per the bank's requirements. Lambdas were written in Python due to its ease of comprehension and flexibility. With it being a popular language means going forward, BAU/operations team members are able to understand and modify the lambdas with confidence.
How we used AWS as part of the Solution
The solution uses several AWS services including Config as the data source, Lambda to process, normalize and push the data to SNOW via SNS, DynamoDB to manage the state of the resources. The solution is also deployed via automation using a combination of CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodePipeline. Careful consideration was given to lambda concurrency and memory in order to remain cost effective and scalable. Likewise, SNS attributes was configured in a way to ensure that the solution is fault tolerant.
The result
Our knowledge of AWS services allowed CIL to architect a solution that honours the Well-Architected Framework while still meeting the bank's custom requirements. Moreover, the solution was delivered on time ensuring the bank is compliant with industry regulations. The bank now has an up-to-date view on select AWS resources which can be used to generate reports and statistics.
Next Steps
To learn more about how AWS and CIL can help your business,
Meet a few of our clients
Cecure Intelligence Limited is trusted by the most innovative and tech-forward companies who focus on customer experience without compromising on business goals.
Vodafone Group
Outscope IT
GBG PLC
Bank of Ireland
Vantage Towers
Jously
