With Puppet, Interhyp Automates & Meets Strict Compliance with a Click
Interhyp Group AG (known as Interhyp) is the largest broker of residential mortgages in Germany. To support its powerful platform, enhance change tracking, maintain strict compliance, and meet high customer expectations, Interhyp sought Puppet’s automation, configuration management, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) solutions.
Benefits of Using Puppet:
One-click change details
with continuous delivery and configuration management
Replaced manually written records
with self-service documentation
Met strict compliance
in highly regulated financial services industry
Challenge: Manual Documentation, Tedious Change Records, and High Compliance Standards
Advisors at Interhyp handle confidential documentation via a central mortgage platform, documenting details of every customer and property to provide mortgage recommendations.
Their web platform’s Java-based microservices integrate with their Python-based tools to help Interhyp advisors collect, correlate, and classify many data points — like location, property type, loan amount, equity ratio, payment terms, and market developments like interest rates — to compare the customer’s desires and bank offers against potential financing partners.
Interhyp’s web platform enables a high degree of customer service and requires a strong IT hand to manage. It also places the company under strict security and compliance requirements.
“The large number of applications and the different languages, runtimes, development kits, and language libraries are always a challenge for IT management,” said Willi Bühler, Head of Application Technology at Interhyp. “In addition, as a financial service provider, we operate in an industry that is subject to strict compliance and risk management requirements. At the same time, we are required to weave compliance into our development process.”
The company’s need for security, compliance, and consistency means one-off configuration isn’t a viable solution. “My team looks after several hundred services, and without automation tools, it wouldn’t work at all,” Bühler says. “We have been automating the change processes themselves (i.e., the configuration of servers and services) with Open Source Puppet for years, and for our internal IT service management processes, we also use ServiceNow."
Open Source Puppet ensured that all changes made by developers and administrators were rolled out automatically to all servers, but change records still had to be written by hand — not feasible when 20 to 30 changes are to be implemented per day and each takes about 15 minutes to fill out a corresponding form. To generate necessary documentation at the pace they needed to stay compliant, they needed a more scalable solution.
Solution: An Automated Change Record & Faster, More Confident Compliance through Configuration as Code
“Since Puppet knows what it changes, we only needed to connect it to ServiceNow and add functions for documentation.”
- Willi Bühler, Head of Application Technology, Interhyp
To meet their compliance requirements without disrupting the IT services they relied on, Interhyp switched from Open Source Puppet to Puppet Enterprise with Continuous Delivery. The combination of enterprise-scale configuration management with automated documentation streamlined their change management process.
With “top-notch” help from Puppet Professional Services, Interhyp migrated from Open Source Puppet to Puppet Enterprise and was report-ready in just two weeks.
Now, instead of writing change records for dozens of changes every single day, every change to software and hardware is quick, precise, clear, and auditable. The change record automatically documents what changes were made to what resources, which applications were directly and indirectly affected, who made the changes, and information on the release process.
Since Interhyp moved to Puppet Enterprise with Continuous Delivery, they can view all those change details with just a few clicks. Continuous Delivery supports continuous delivery of code, integrates with their existing ServiceNow instance, and analyzes the impact of changes on other systems.
Their Puppet Enterprise Continuous Delivery pipeline can even be customized to define verification steps and incorporate necessary approval processes. Continuous Delivery evaluates changes and passes the corresponding information to ServiceNow, which means they can create a change record with all the information they need automatically in their self-service IT management platform. That lets them pull reports automatically or on demand to prove compliance to auditors, stay secure, and pass audits with more confidence and less prep time.
Puppet Enterprise is the solution of choice for organizations that need stronger configuration management, robust change reporting, and confidence in the continuous compliance of their critical systems. Try it today or get in touch with the Puppet team to learn more.