Cepsa automates its IT with Red Hat

Red Hat has announced that it has collaborated with Cepsa in the implementation of its IT automation strategy so that it has the ability to innovate faster and streamline its operations. Working with Red Hat Consulting, Cepsa has implemented Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and was able to increase operational efficiency by 35%, reduce IT response times by 15%, and free up more than 6,000 hours of work previously spent on repetitive computing tasks to dedicate them to more strategic tasks.

Cepsa is a leading international company committed to sustainable mobility and energy with solid technical experience after more than 90 years of activity. The company also has a world-leading chemical business with an increasingly sustainable activity. Recently, it has presented its strategic plan for 2030, ‘Positive Motion’, which projects its ambition to be a leader in sustainable mobility, biofuels and green hydrogen in Spain and Portugal, and to become a benchmark in the energy transition. The company places customers at the center of its activity and will work with them to help them advance their decarbonisation goals.

The company constantly seeks to improve efficiency and offer better service to its employees, partners and end consumers. With this objective, Cepsa reinforced its digital transformation strategy in 2019 with the creation of a hybrid cloud platform with Red Hat OpenShift to facilitate the deployment of digital services with greater speed and agility.

Cepsa started its automation process by carrying out some basic automations on a pilot basis and quickly realized its operational benefits. Leveraging the Ansible Automation Platform, you have automated your infrastructure, including operating systems, servers, storage, and virtualization. IT automation has become essential for credential enforcement and security capabilities as new cybersecurity policies require the business to keep systems updated more frequently. In addition, Cepsa has been able to implement pre-established actions with the Ansible Automation Platform so that, in the event of incidents, the teams can restart the servers, minimizing downtime and the impact on their customers. Currently, it runs more than 400 automated processes, with the goal of developing more in the coming years.

Cepsa reinforced its digital transformation strategy in 2019 with the creation of a hybrid cloud platform with Red Hat OpenShift

A critical automation project for Cepsa has been the migration of its on-premise SAP platform to SAP S/4 HANA in the AWS cloud. Ansible Automation Platform allowed Cepsa to automate processes that could be repeated as many times as necessary, while reducing the margin of error caused by manual tasks. In two months, Cepsa migrated more than 60 on-premise servers to the public cloud.

At Cepsa, like a growing number of organizations, automation is not just about technology but about a change in mindset. Cepsa collaborated with Red Hat Consulting to establish a tailored automation strategy throughout the organization. Working with Red Hat, Cepsa introduced DevOps methodologies to help drive cultural change. Cepsa worked with its teams to spread a culture of automation, help them understand the benefits and foster greater collaboration.

As a result of their shift towards automation, Cepsa’s IT department can now work more independently to automate tasks and spend more time on innovative projects of higher commercial value for customers and reduce IT response time by up to 15%. Partners, such as service stations, also benefit from faster problem resolution; for example, passwords can now be reset in five minutes, whereas previously the wait time could be more than 30 minutes.