Source: businesswire.com. This article summarizes a case study originally published by Red Hat in August 2019.
Background: SoftBank’s Automation Strategy
Headquartered in Tokyo, SoftBank is one of Japan’s largest telecommunications service providers. The company has pursued an aggressive internal efficiency programme over several years. In 2015, SoftBank adopted the internal slogan “Half & Twice” — a commitment to cut manual effort and costs by half through technology adoption while simultaneously doubling productivity and creativity. The following year, the 2016 slogan “Smart & Fun!” reinforced the message, encouraging employees to redirect time saved by automation toward innovative and higher-value activities.
As a practical expression of these goals, SoftBank identified SSL certificate management as a prime candidate for automation. The process of updating SSL certificates on load balancers — used for back-end server access on public-facing websites as well as internal systems — was entirely manual, operator-dependent, and increasingly burdensome.
The Problem: Manual SSL Certificate Updates at Scale
SSL certificates are critical to securing server connections, but managing them across a large, heterogeneous infrastructure introduces significant operational overhead. At SoftBank, the challenge was compounded by several factors:
- Different procedures per system: Each load balancer or system type required its own operator and its own update procedure, meaning no single workflow could be reused across environments.
- Manual documentation burden: Engineers had to prepare a separate operations manual for each update cycle.
- Variable update times: Depending on the system and the individual operator’s skill level, a single certificate update could take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours.
- High update frequency: Changes to industry standards and certificate validity rules meant SoftBank needed to perform approximately 800 certificate updates per year — a volume that made the manual approach unsustainable.
- After-hours work: Many updates were performed at night to avoid impacting production systems, placing an additional burden on operations staff.
The Solution: Red Hat Ansible Tower
To address these challenges, SoftBank deployed Red Hat Ansible Tower (now known as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform’s controller component). Ansible Tower provides a web-based UI, role-based access control, job scheduling, and centralised logging on top of the core Ansible automation engine — capabilities that made it well-suited to standardising and delegating certificate update tasks across a large operations team.
SoftBank worked closely with Red Hat Consulting throughout the implementation to design Ansible Playbooks that encoded the previously manual, per-system procedures into repeatable, auditable automation.
Measured Outcomes
SoftBank reported the following results after deploying Ansible Tower for SSL certificate management:
| Metric | Before Ansible Tower | After Ansible Tower |
|---|---|---|
| Time per certificate update | 30 minutes – 2 hours | As little as 20 seconds |
| Total work hours for updates | Baseline | Reduced by 99% |
| Update accuracy | Operator-dependent | Standardised via Playbooks |
| After-hours burden on staff | Significant | Substantially reduced |
By codifying update procedures into shared Ansible Playbooks, SoftBank eliminated the skill-level variability that had previously made update times unpredictable. Updates became consistent, fast, and executable by a broader range of staff without requiring deep per-system expertise.
Team Enablement and Skills Development
The Red Hat Consulting engagement extended beyond tooling implementation to include structured skills transfer. As a result, approximately 30% of employees in the department using Ansible Tower obtained a Red Hat Expert Certificate — Ansible Automation. The time freed up from repetitive manual update tasks was redirected toward learning new skills and improving broader operational processes — directly realising SoftBank’s “Smart & Fun!” workforce strategy.
Planned Expansion
Following the success of the SSL certificate automation initiative, SoftBank outlined plans to extend Ansible automation to additional infrastructure domains, including:
- Datacenters both inside and outside the company
- Network devices and configuration management
- Appliance devices used on internal networks
- Existing on-premises servers
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Infrastructure Teams
SoftBank’s case illustrates several automation principles applicable to any large infrastructure team:
- Target high-frequency, low-complexity tasks first. SSL certificate updates were a strong automation candidate because they were frequent, well-defined, and performed consistently enough to be encoded in Playbooks without major exception handling complexity.
- Standardise before you automate. Ansible Playbooks forced SoftBank to rationalise the different per-system procedures, which itself improved consistency before any execution benefit was realised.
- Pair tooling adoption with formal training. The Red Hat Consulting engagement ensured the team could maintain and extend automation independently, rather than creating a dependency on external support.
- Measure the human impact, not just the technical metrics. Reducing after-hours work and enabling employees to pursue skill development are outcomes that matter to retention and morale, not just to SLAs.
Supporting Quotes
Mochizuki Hirokazu, President and Representative Director, Red Hat K.K.:
“SoftBank faced the challenge of efficiently managing operations in complicated IT environments. By automating IT operations dependent on individual skills and reducing manual operations, Red Hat Ansible Tower has helped SoftBank improve organizational productivity and quality of services as well as reduce maintenance time.”
Takayori Maeda, Section Manager, Technology Unit, IT & Network Unit, Information Technology Division, IT Infrastructure Division, SoftBank Corp.:
“The adoption of Red Hat Ansible Tower has helped enable quicker and more flexible automation of our network infrastructure management work. With Red Hat Consulting we have been able to train our technical personnel to use Red Hat Ansible Tower, which has led to improved operations. We plan to expand our use of Red Hat Ansible Tower to provide a higher-quality and more reliable infrastructure.”