Case Study: Bank Hapoalim achieves secure, automated infrastructure and rapid deployments with Chef

Automating infrastructure in a highly secure environment

Bank Hapoalim, Israel’s largest bank, needed to modernize and secure a heterogeneous infrastructure of Linux, Unix and Windows systems while eliminating repetitive, error-prone manual work. The Unix/Linux team faced slow, inconsistent deployments and onerous security hardening requirements across multiple DMZs, and wanted repeatable, standards-compliant processes that reduced operational risk and time-to-deploy.

The team adopted Chef as their central configuration-management and package/proxy repository, using a single secure access point (port 443) with NGINX and F5 tunnels to meet strict security controls. They developed custom cookbooks (including rapid hardening playbooks), automated server provisioning and testing workflows, and now manage hundreds of nodes with plans to expand to Windows—cutting stack creation from days to minutes, eliminating many human errors, ensuring consistent compliance, and enabling centralized, scalable software delivery.

Bank Hapoalim

Pavel Jeloudovski

Senior Systems Administrator