The Benefits of Automating Compliance Reporting & Remediation

­­­­­­­­­­Do you know if your network would pass a compliance audit at this given moment? Most teams don’t.

With the number of network devices and network services constantly increasing, it becomes incredibly difficult for network teams to have a grasp of whether all their individual network elements, which comprise the whole infrastructure, are configured optimally and operating securely. In order to avoid security breaches and network outages across on-prem and cloud networks, today’s enterprise organizations need to take a deep look at how they are equipping their network teams to successfully get a grasp on the state of their network compliance. Network compliance in today’s modern, expanded network requires more than the tools of the previous networking era, it requires a modern approach to configuration compliance, reporting, and remediation with a focus on automating these processes together.

Inflexible legacy configuration and compliance solutions as well as disparate open source tools make it too difficult to bridge the gap between compliance reporting and building flexible automations that can remediate changes across both CLI and API networking elements. This gap forces network teams to fall back on manual processes of remediation, which simple cannot scale, creating more and more manual backlog over time. If the goal is to maintain the highest possible level of security and reliability across any network infrastructure, then network teams need more than sticks and stones to battle the giant beast of compliance reporting and remediation.

The Need for a Modern Approach to Network Compliance Reporting & Remediation

Over the course of time, standards for the business will evolve which means that network devices, regardless of on-prem or cloud-based, must have their configurations updated to adhere to these new standards. Ensuring that your network maintains a state of compliance builds trust and confidence in your network. Unfortunately, this is a huge hurdle for network teams as they are mostly relying on human intervention to check every network device. Given the immense amount of time it takes to manually accomplish this, there is a high risk that network devices have drifted out of compliance, operating outside of the safe standard and posing an unnecessary risk to the business.

That’s why network teams must be equipped with a modern automated compliance and remediation solution that is flexible in its ability to support all of today’s network infrastructure and any new network solutions your organization may adopt in the future. The network is comprised of more than just CLI-based device and as more and more network solutions are managed through APIs, modern solutions must also have robust, native support for API managed network solutions and cloud-based network services, providing the flexibility needed to bridge the gap between CLI and API network elements. In addition to bridging the gap to support both CLI and API, network teams must also bridge the skills gap and solve the problem of automating the compliance process as quickly as possible.

With Itential Configuration Manager, network teams can quickly build Golden Configurations to ensure all network devices meet your standard for all CLI and API network infrastructure, run compliance checks, and even remediate within a single application, so they can immediately get the network into compliance. Within Itential’s platform, teams can automate their configuration processes in a straightforward, drag-and-drop canvas, that does not require any code. This allows the network team to transition from compliance to automation in one easy step (as I recently demonstrated in a recent webinar that you can check out here). Network teams can build powerful compliance automations in a couple of clicks, schedule them to run, integrate intelligent remediation and ultimately reduce manual backlog while maintaining compliance for the entire network. This level of integrated compliance automation does not exist in legacy solutions and attempting to do this with multiple open source solutions will involve learning to write code, determining which tools out of the myriad of open source projects to use, and then writing code to make it all work together. This is simply not a feasible strategy for today’s network team.

Why Automate Network Compliance Reporting & Remediation

Automating the compliance reporting and remediation process is critical for network teams to maintain security and reliability across the expanding, complex networking environment we live in today. The legacy tools of the previous era of networking have met their limitations and can no longer be considered viable if we want our network teams to be successful. In order to avoid risks to the business due to non-compliant network elements, network teams must begin to adopt new processes and a platform to support automated compliance reporting to ensure a complete accounting of the state of compliance for your network at any given moment and automated remediation to ensure that once non-compliance is detected, it is quickly fixed without relying on human intervention.

The Itential Automation Platform a modern solution to automating compliance and remediation across today’s hybrid network infrastructure, enabling network teams to maintain consistent compliance across hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud networks. This modern solution tightly integrates compliance and automation components, giving network teams the flexibility to build new compliance and remediation automations without writing a single line of code.

To learn more about what’s holding you back from automating and modernizing your network configuration and compliance processes and how to get started, check out our eBook, “10 Questions to Assess Your Network Automation Readiness.”