The benefit is in terms of time-saving. There is more time for our team to worry about and take care of other engineering work than worrying about installing endpoints. Also, our Oracle database team is working on Ansible Playbooks to automate patching, which takes a long time to plan and do, especially in the production workloads. We are working very closely with that group. We also work with the backup group to see how we can automate the day-to-day mundane processes. All these aspects bring us a lot of value. We are saving time, and we can also restructure and understand our necessity to have extra people on the team. We can cut down costs on that. We can reorganize ourselves to focus on much better technology, such as AI and things like that, instead of wasting time doing manual processes. It has helped us achieve our mission. It helps to reduce the workforce and manage the time of our existing workforce. They can be more involved in new technologies such as AI. Understanding them takes time. They save a lot of time with automation. We use other Red Hat products. We use OpenShift. When containers started taking off, which was about six to seven years ago, the government sector did not want to go into the cloud and use AWS containers. However, in our county, the customers were demanding that. They were saying that their applications are modernizing and we need to provide them with a container environment. That is when we decided to go for it. Because we were already Red Hat customers and we have been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 4.x, we decided to go for OpenShift. It was the same platform, and they were offering manageable containers. That is how we brought in the container platform. It is rock-solid. We had it on-prem. We have moved it to AWS, and it is great. The new thing is OpenShift Container Platform Plus which comes with a slew of additional tools. These tools help us provide the necessary application infrastructure for containers for customers. We have Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OCP running in AWS. It takes away a lot of work. For example, if you have five security products to install, you install the first one, test it, and make sure it works. You then install the second one, the third one, and the fourth one, and then something happens. Something breaks. All that is taken away because we have foolproof systems built into our playbooks. There is also a continuous workflow from the start until the end. With Ansible Tower, the automation methodology is simple. There is ease of learning. It definitely reduces the training required to learn how to automate things for technical folks. It is much easier than writing bash scripts. This reduced training affects our operations or business. For example, if security folks come and say that they need to write a bash script that will go into their workflow to install, uninstall, and upgrade agents, that is a lot easier to do with Ansible Playbooks. It helps to bring teams together. Black lines between the operations, security, and other teams are going away. Those lines are becoming more gray and light gray. There are DevOps and SecOps, and even finance is becoming FinOps. It definitely helps teams come together, and then we try our best to guide the teams, whether it is the Oracle team or security team, so that eventually they will learn to do their own playbooks. We can always be the guardrails. It increases productivity, saves time, and even saves the cost of people working after hours trying to get these things going. It is all in the workflow. It has definitely helped to reduce the time we spend on low-value or repetitive tasks. There is a huge difference. About 20% of my staff's time is saved. They do not have to worry about things. Once you set it, you can forget it unless there is a change or there is something different. For example, the security group comes and says that they have stopped using the Cisco product. They are using some other vendor's endpoint security. In such a case, all we have to do is change those variables, and we are done. Previously, we had to go back, use the Windows uninstall program and reinstall. This is much easier.
