The ‘before’
Firewall change requests were submitted via a legacy SharePoint site, or attached in an Excel sheet for bulk changes. There was no validation at submission so requests were passed to a service desk for triage – this was bottleneck number one – all requests were being funneled into a queue for triage and allocation to functional teams. If the request wasn’t filled in completely, then further follow-up was required with the requestor.
Once a request arrived at the correct functional team, it entered another review phase. This time, the request was assessed for technical and security implications, and again if technical detail was missing it required further follow up with the requestor (bottleneck number two).
Finally, once the request was completely valid, and approved from a security standpoint it could be allocated to one final queue for an engineer to pick up and complete the task.