How Customers Leverage Itential to Automate Configuration & Compliance Across Hybrid Network Infrastructure

It’s one thing to talk about how enterprises can achieve modern network compliance, but it’s another one to show it. That’s exactly what we did in the last installment of Itential’s Modern Network Compliance webinar series, “The Journey of a Customer.” We discussed how three different customers with very different networks approached automating their configuration compliance and remediation with Itential.

It’s always great to share firsthand accounts of how the Itential Automation Platform has helped our customers succeed on their network automation journey. By looking at their specific challenges, how they got started with Itential, how they expanded into automation, and discussing their results I hope you can learn something new that can be applied to your team’s network configuration and automation success.

Data Center Compliance: Eliminating Configuration Based Outages

For the largest US Domestic Airline, reducing downtime across their data center network was top priority. Due to the critical nature of their network, any network downtime results in customers unable to purchase tickets and airplanes that cannot leave the terminal, all costing an upwards of $1M per hour of downtime. It was determined that a lack of configuration standardization across their data center network devices was the core issue, causing different network devices to respond in unanticipated or unexpected ways in response to any network changes. Outages caused by non-compliant devices were also prolonged because troubleshooting “snowflake” network devices takes even longer.

By leveraging Itential, this customer was able to quickly build a Golden Configuration template for the data center and build automations to check and remediate changes which resulted in eliminating configuration-based outages. By implementing Golden Configuration through Itential Configuration Manager, this airline mitigated any configuration-based outages across the entire country as well as the time of 2 FTEs spent resolving tickets through swivel chairing across multiple work streams. This result can be credited to the standardization of configurations across their 3,500 routers and 1,500 devices.

You can read the full case study here.

Hybrid Cloud Compliance: Enforcing Compliance Across CLI & CPI

For a global pharmaceuticals company, maintaining network compliance in their on-prem network and across their cloud infrastructure was critical. Their network consisted of a mix of older CLI-based network devices, more modern CLI-based network devices, and an SD-WAN solution with API management capabilities through a controller. To maintain compliance within the on-prem network, it’s necessary to automate software upgrades as well as device configurations but they were plagued with velocity issues and suffered from a lack of teamwide automation adoption.

With Itential, they were able to build automations to increase their ability to accomplish more software upgrades across all their network devices, while another team was able to build Golden Configurations for all their network devices and enforce compliance. Because the Itential Automation Platform has native support for API integration, it was straightforward to also build Golden Configuration templates for their cloud infrastructure and enforce the same compliance and security standards across all their infrastructure. Itential’s solution provided a way to bring several infrastructure teams together in a common platform to automate their network infrastructure safely and securely across on-prem and cloud.

You can watch a demo to see how Itential Configuration Manager maintains compliance across hybrid infrastructure here.

Hybrid Cloud Compliance Through Automated Validation & Remediation

For a global retailer, they were challenged with resolving bottlenecks in deploying network infrastructure. As the company shifted to deploying more cloud-based infrastructure in response to online customer demand accelerated with the pandemic, it became harder for the network team to keep up with the higher rate of changes to network, firewall, and load balancing devices. The network team used mostly manual processes with some automation scripts with limited capabilities, and their concern was that any infrastructure changes must be first verified to not cause security or reliability issues in the network.

Unlike their existing legacy NCCM solution, the Itential Automation Platform supports their on-prem firewalls and load balancers and their choice of cloud platforms (AWS and Azure), which allowed them to start by building Golden Configuration templates for their infrastructure and ensure compliance. The next step was to build compliance automations with intelligent automated remediation to reduce backlog while ensuring the network is consistently compliant. After this, they could confidently build self-service automations using validation steps so that any proposed network changes are checked for compliance before they are applied to any network device or service. With Itential they were also able to integrate their existing Ansible, Python, and Terraform automations into the platform so they could also be used when needed, without having to build them from scratch.

To learn more about how to implement validation into automations with Itential, check out the full webinar here.

With today’s network being a mix of traditional network devices and cloud network services, network teams must be equipped with a new way to automate their configuration and compliance across their entire infrastructure. It’s not enough to have pockets of automation occur within different network types. Enterprises today are demanding more of the network teams than ever. To deliver faster network changes without compromising the network’s security or reliability, customers look to Itential to deliver a platform that can support automation and compliance across the entire network.

You can watch the full webinar here to learn more about each customer story and if you’re ready to give the Itential Automation Platform a try for yourself, you can create a free account here and start automating configuration use cases in minutes.