Cisco Systems has revealed how it assisted Ameritas, an insurance company in Lincoln, Nebraska, to cut its IT spending.
The goal of Ameritas behind the infrastructure upgrade in partnership with Cisco Systems was to improve agility and operational efficiency while increasing IT security.
Cisco Systems said the new technology infrastructure has reduced Capex by 30 to 40 percent in switching devices alone and freed up 25 to 30 percent of the network operations team’s time.
Ameritas’ IT department has benefited as the new data centers started providing a supportive environment for application developers to help bring new products and services to market quickly.
Ameritas has utilized Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI), Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), Cisco FirePOWER Next Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS), and the Citrix NetScaler Application Delivery Controller for upgrading the data centers.
“We found Cisco ACI to be the industry’s most comprehensive and integrated solution, with support for physical, virtual, and cloud environments, single-pane-of-glass management and a common policy framework that spans both our data centers,” said Matt Billmeier, a director in IT at Ameritas.
Investment in Cisco ACI has assisted Ameritas to ensure scalable network operations because it could configure once and then deploy across the entire network fabric.
The company found that ACI’s seamless integration with the Cisco FirePOWER NGIPS increases security by providing automated threat protection. The company has also gained from less human intervention and decision making ensuring faster response times for Ameritas. ACI also improves security by facilitating micro-segmentation at the application layer.
The open Cisco ACI framework has 65 ecosystem members who can take advantage of the open Application Programming Interface (API) to integrate their solutions, allowing IT organizations to leverage a rich set of third-party appliances and solutions with ACI.
Ameritas will be looking at Cisco Tetration Analytics solution to add more automation and additional intelligence through application monitoring and machine learning to make the network smarter and more adaptable.
