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Cutting Change Approvals to an Hour for Northern Trust
RapDev automated Northern Trust's CI/CD gate checks on ServiceNow
RapDev's ServiceNow DevOps implementation cut Northern Trust's change approvals from one week to one hour while preserving a compliant audit trail
Customer Challenges
- Approvals needed manual input from five teams
- One-week delay on every sprint
- Gaps in compliance and auditing
- Thousands of changes a week to review
RapDev
Solutions
- ServiceNow DevOps deployment for microservices.
- Implementation of Github support for SDLC.
- Automated policy enforcement using ServiceNow DevOps.
Business
Outcomes
- One week to one hour for change approvals
- 97% CMDB accuracy via CSDM as Code
- 186 pipelines and 99 repositories onboarded
- 3 hours regained per developer
Northern Trust is a Fortune 500 financial services business headquartered in Chicago, serving corporations, institutional investors, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals.
One of the largest and oldest continuously operating banks in the U.S., it maintains offices across 22 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and 22 international locations. Staying competitive in financial services means shipping high-quality software quickly, under heavy regulation.
25K+
Employees
Worldwide
$1.5 T
Assets under Management
$15.7 T
Assets under custody
The Challenge
Speed vs. Compliance
Core Challenge
For a single change, employees often had to contact five different teams to gather testing results before approving a release. With thousands of changes a week, manual gate checks were slow and subjective.
In a highly regulated industry, every approval still had to be compliant and auditable.
The Solution
Automated Gate Checks
SERVICENOW DEVOPS FOR MICROSERVICES
RapDev deployed the DevOps module using a tagging strategy that tracks microservices as SDLC components. Registering every microservice via CSDM as Code pushed configuration management database accuracy to 97%, cutting overall risk.
AUTOMATED ARTIFACT DISCOVERY
Proprietary automation tooling detects new artifacts and pushes them into ServiceNow with the artifact name, version, and test results attached, replacing manual checks of test results.
GITHUB ACTIONS SUPPORT
Northern Trust had already chosen the ServiceNow DevOps module, but it didn't support GitHub Actions out of the box, and the pipelines required it. RapDev extended the implementation to close that gap and get the pipelines running.
POLICY-DRIVEN APPROVALS & GRC
A change approval policy now drives automated approval, manual review, or automated rejection. RapDev also recommended the ServiceNow Governance, Risk, and Compliance application so that every decision leaves an audit trail.
The Results
Increased Speed and Accuracy, Time Saved
Zero Sev 1 Incidents
Unexpected shutdowns dropped from four a month to none post deployment
250+ Dashboards
Filterable by region, country, and role for every audience
1,300+ Servers Covered
Full Datadog deployment across a globally distributed estate
Automated Health Checks
Proactive alerts and synthetic transactions catch issues first
“As a DevOps leader, I want to automate all development activities as much as possible. Bringing all this into a popular system of records like ServiceNow is a big accomplishment. That visibility gives us risk mitigation from the code quality and licensing perspective. RapDev made this a reality.”
- Basivi R. Junna, the VP/Principal Architect of DevOps at Northern Trust
What's Next
ServiceNow Enterprise Rollout
With ServiceNow's value proven, Northern Trust plans to implement the DevOps module across the organization, extending the time savings, risk reduction, and workflow improvements already in place. The team also identified additional ServiceNow use cases that further increase platform ROI.
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