Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Get a Clearer View on Your Network Compliance

There’s a very old proverb about perspective that goes something like this, “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” It occurs when someone is so focused on a single thing, they lose sight of the greater whole. Personally, I’m guilty of living this out more often than I would like to admit, allowing myself to get caught up in the minutiae of one part of a larger task. Just ask my family about my ruthless, Tetris-like efficiency to pack the car before leaving for vacation. I’ve been known to pack and re-pack the SUV multiple times to optimize for multiple variables –immediate item access, item weight, structural integrity, driver visibility, additional space for new purchases, etc. In my hyper-focus to get the packing perfect, I fail to take a few steps back to take in the whole picture: my family sitting patiently in the car wondering when the vacation will actually start.

In the world of IT, we can see this going on. Many different technical teams are focused on accomplishing their own tasks as quickly as possible and it becomes difficult to step back and see the forest for the trees. Network Engineers are looking for ways to quickly reduce the daily backlog of network changes, optimize and secure their existing networks, and deploy new network devices and services. In order to accomplish these important activities, they must implement solutions that enable them to automate network configuration and compliance. This has been the focus, and it’s necessary, but all too often it becomes easy to lose sight of the forest.

Why Integration is the Only Way to See the Forest

Let’s take a moment and take a step back to consider the process that that leads up to automating network configuration and compliance. In order to make any network change, there’s a process of preparation, documentation, and notification that must occur. What are the IT systems you interact with as part of this process and how much time do you spend in each? Every organization has a different ecosystem of solutions, but a typical forest of IT systems that is involved in many network automation processes includes:

• IPAM/Source of Truth
• ITSM/Change Management System
• Notification/Messaging
• Networking Controllers/SDN Systems

When examining the larger picture, most network teams spend a lot of time preparing for a network change by pulling any required information from different sources of truth. From there, they must open a new change request and document all of the details in a system like ServiceNow. In fact, there are usually several visits to the ITSM system as part of the overall process. Most processes include the requirement to notify teams or individuals when changes are about to occur and after they are complete, which requires network teams to spend more time crafting messages in one or more messaging systems like Slack, Teams, or email. All of this swivel chair activity takes up a tremendous amount of time, effort, and energy.

I’ll always remember when a customer had this precise moment of epiphany. After quickly building a network automation for a specific task, our team showed them how to extend that very automation by integrating with Infoblox for IP address management, ServiceNow for managing change requests, and Slack and email for real-time notification. After an awkward silence to take it all in, this customer experienced a moment of realization, followed by a verbal recognition of how much time they spent bouncing between these systems, how much they (and the entire team) really disliked doing it, how often they suffered from bad data being input by people between all of these various systems, and how they wished they could be doing real networking work instead of always finding themselves stuck in the daily swivel chair.

How Itential Extends Compliance Use Cases through Integration

The Itential Automation Platform was purpose-built to help network teams connect to everything, so they automate everything. Teams can quickly create automations and easily integrate with all of their IT systems in order to save them time, so they can focus on building and maintaining their network. Our out-of-the-box integrations provides teams the flexibility needed to extend their configuration and compliance uses cases past the change itself.

To learn more about Itential’s approach to modern configuration and compliance click here or check out and register for our webinar series on “Modern Network Compliance.”