Credit Suisse transform from centralized automation to self-service Site Reliability Engineering

For IT operational staff, repetitive manual tasks that are tied to running production services often require an inordinate amount of time every day.

“We are in an environment that’s always looking to drive down cost. That is difficult when operational teams are constantly firefighting and don’t have the capacity to do additional work.” - Michael Jones, VP of SRE, Credit Suisse.

Automation is an obvious solution, but with 47,000 employees using thousands of apps, requests to Credit Suisse’s central automation team would often fall into a backlog. To speed up automation, Credit Suisse decided to move to a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) model, in which operational teams who have a deep understanding of specific business and service processes could independently introduce automation where it was needed, quickly.

In 2019, Credit Suisse began their SRE transformation journey. As well as a mindset change, this involved creating an automation governance and management framework. IT operations staff who serve federated production teams – such as the Equities Trading organization – were then equipped with self-service automation tools, including Leapwork.

These strategic tools were selected because of their ability to onboard non-technical users and facilitate rapid automation progress, with no reliance on the central automation team.

As a result, Credit Suisse have automated 50% of ‘toil’, up from 10% in 2019. Toil refers to the manual, repetitive tasks linked to running business applications. The aim is to automate 55% by the end of 2021. Automated tasks include daily server-side diagnostics checks for trading applications to ensure they perform without issues or latencies when they are launched every morning before the market opens.

“This is quite an amazing turnaround, and it’s simply because the operators are now able to automate their own toil very easily and very quickly. We’re reducing our dependency on centralized teams, and we now have a more hybrid approach."

Michael Jones, VP of SRE, Credit Suisse