How We Manage the Network is as Critical as Speeds & Feeds

There has been a lack of investment in network management plane solutions, which puts more pressure on the network to perform. As the management plane is primarily made up of teams within siloed organizations, they are plagued with fragmented management domains and tool choices that make standardization nearly impossible.

Not to mention, the fear of failure holds them back from moving faster as manual errors can cause major network outages.

Shifting from Reactive to Proactive Management

As modern networks are generating massive amounts of work that exceeds the ability of human operations to manage or even understand in a timely manner, automation is becoming increasingly necessary to re-think traditional network management.

The Importance of Re-Thinking Traditional Network Management
Currently, many networks are managed in a very reactive way through manual, time-consuming processes in order to maintain the status quo and keep the lights on. This reactive approach leads to a never-ending backlog of mundane, but important, networking tasks that steal valuable time from the networking team. It’s imperative that teams shift toward managing the network in a way that reduces the time needed to complete tasks and mitigates errors along the way.

Implementing an automation solution can give teams the time they need to get ahead of their backlog and start managing in a more proactive way. Automating time-consuming network maintenance tasks such as configuration backups and device software upgrades allows network teams to focus on higher priority activities like tuning and improving the existing network infrastructure.

By adopting network automation, organizations can begin to look past simply keeping the lights on by automating routine tasks. Teams can get more done in the same amount of time and start looking ahead, instead of constantly being bogged down by the backlog.

Network Automation Solutions Should Embrace:

• Low-Code – By utilizing a low-code, drag-and-drop interface, network engineers can easily design, build, and visualize repeatable automations without needing to learn code.
• End-to-End Automation – It’s impossible for people alone to manage the modern network, therefore they must look further than automating the execution of a task to automating the full end-to-end process from ticket opening to closure.
• Network Intelligence – With a network intelligent enabled platform, teams can quickly build end-to-end operational automations through the ability to consume, understand, and execute network specific tasks.

Itential’s Approach to Simplifying Network Management

Itential was built on the premise of simplifying network management. We saw network teams being held back by the tools they were provided as network technologies have evolved at a slower pace than most technologies. Traditional methods of managing the network though manual command line interfaces (CLI), ad-hoc scripting, and siloed domain specifics point solutions were unable to scale and keep pace with emerging technologies.

The Itential Automation Platform is the only automation platform built for network and cloud, allowing teams to truly simplify how they’re managing their network so they achieve proactive network automation across their entire network. Our low-code platform integrates to everything in your ecosystem to give teams the power to automate across their entire network in a proactive method, including automated validation of any network change.

Our goal is to ensure that teams are never stuck in reactive network management due to skills, resources, or tool constraints.