At Itential, we’re committed to making automation and orchestration easy to implement and practical to use, so that organizations can get the most value out of their investments.
We’ve delivered our capabilities to enable some of the world’s largest companies to transform and modernize their networks, achieving greater velocity and the ability to introduce innovative operational models like self-serve networking and platform engineering. And our technology ensures network teams can always keep up with demand, even as networks continue to expand.
How?
Orchestration.
We’re the only platform that offers multi-domain, multi-vendor orchestration capabilities across all of network and cloud infrastructure, allowing teams to build workflows and deliver end-to-end outcomes for any type of infrastructure service.
Orchestration is about connecting and coordinating processes, platforms, systems, and data across the organization. Across technologies, across locations, and across teams. The number one thing Itential delivers is the ability for everyone in the organization to benefit from a new, central platform that integrates, orchestrates, and exposes network and infrastructure services securely.
This brings value to every part of the organization, from the network team to the executives to security teams. Here’s what Itential’s orchestration capabilities mean for each group in your organization:
Network Engineering
When you think of the benefits of network orchestration, the network team probably comes to mind first — and for good reason.
The ability to orchestrate end-to-end processes enables network teams to keep up with the increasing demand they’re facing as more applications and services require network changes. With Itential, teams can eliminate manual activities like updating tickets or querying inventory systems, leveraging API-driven integration to easily incorporate these steps into an orchestrated workflow.
It’s about enabling network engineers to do more with less effort. Repeated work can be turned into easily reusable assets, best practices can be standardized and shared across the team, and orchestrated services can be delivered as zero-touch products, which helps reduce manual ticket backlogs.
Itential also makes configuration management easy across both CLI and API devices and services. With one platform, the network team can easily enforce policies and generate compliance reports across all infrastructure, which is critical in today’s hybrid and multi-cloud world.
Application Development
What’s the biggest hurdle for developers moving quickly and executing on CI/CD principles?
It’s often waiting around for network service requests to be fulfilled. Enterprise applications must be deployed across hybrid network infrastructure, which means testing code requires developers to request services from the network and cloud team(s). But if legacy tooling and manual operations means devs are waiting days for their requests to be fulfilled, they can’t move as quickly as they need to.
At organizations who adopt Itential, you see a different story. Because of the ability to orchestrate services end-to-end, Itential allows network teams to publish network services as standardized products for others in the organization to consume. The platform exposes its API for northbound systems such as ServiceNow, CI/CD pipelines, and IDPs, enabling self-serve delivery for an organization’s library of network services that are critical to agile application development.
Crucially, Itential makes it easy to expose services securely, with RBAC capabilities, integration with SSO, and input validation features. This allows services to be exposed across the organization, even to users without networking expertise, since only authorized users will be able to request services and they’ll only be able to input correctly formatted data.
With Itential’s orchestration capabilities, network infrastructure can support application development in an efficient, standardized way, delivering self-serve capabilities for developers and removing one of the major roadblocks to agile application development.
Security
When things are automated, they aren’t done manually. When they aren’t done manually, you avoid the risk of human error.
That’s a big deal when it comes to network incidents, data breaches, and other fallout. Human error is estimated to be at fault for between 80 and 95% of cybersecurity breaches depending on which source you look at. As you’ve probably heard before, in enterprise network and cybersecurity, individual employees are often referred to as the “weakest link in the chain.”
In addition to the inherent benefits of orchestration in reducing human error, Itential’s configuration management capabilities are also key to ensuring security across a complex hybrid network. Golden Configuration templates can be used for automated network compliance checks, and the same templates can be used to preventatively validate changes before they’re made — avoiding unnecessary risk due to configuration errors. And if errors do occur, it’s easy to automate remediation with workflows that leverage your configuration policies and any relevant sources of truth.
Itential’s integration capabilities are also vital to upholding security, with the ability to easily integrate with existing and future security solutions so teams can incorporate these security platforms into their orchestrated network workflows. Check out this customer story about enabling Blocking as a Service for a real-world example.
IT & ServiceNow Teams
Itential’s deep integration capabilities with ServiceNow give more options to both network engineers and ServiceNow users in an organization.
For network engineers, our ServiceNow integration makes it easy to incorporate API calls to ServiceNow into an orchestrated workflow, allowing, for example, ticket updates to be automated alongside a network change with no manual activity required.
And for the ServiceNow teams, our certified ServiceNow App makes networking a first-class citizen of the ServiceNow environment. Network orchestrations that the network team publishes are dynamically discovered by the App and exposed as easy-to-use services, with forms to capture required data that have input validation built in. In addition, these same published network and infrastructure services can be embedded into ServiceNow Flows as Actions, allowing ServiceNow flow designers to build standardized services that include network and infrastructure changes without slowing down delivery to end users.
And the best part? All of this is possible with no custom code. Integrating various technologies with ServiceNow is often a significant effort at large organizations, with ServiceNow development in high demand. The Itential ServiceNow App eliminates the delays and workload of integration and delivers new levels of efficiency by tightly connecting network infrastructure to ServiceNow.
Learn more about the Itential ServiceNow App
Additional ITSM Platforms
While we’re proud of the depth of our ServiceNow integration capabilities, we’ve built a platform that can integrate via API with any ITSM solution you use in your organization. Itential users can easily generate integrations to Jira, Zendesk, and many more, updating tickets/issues as part of an orchestrated workflow to streamline change management and ensure network changes can easily be tracked and audited.
Executive Initiatives & Organization-Wide Transformation
Because Itential’s orchestration capabilities deliver benefits to all of the groups mentioned above, organizations who adopt Itential see transformative efficiency gains on an organizational level. Innovation, agility, the ability to adopt new technology, and efficient cross-functional collaboration are all priorities for tech leaders looking at the future. Itential’s orchestration capabilities connect everything in your environment with a central platform that delivers efficiency gains across the entire organization.
Digital transformation and modernization, new security strategies like zero-trust and microsegmentation, the ability to deliver self-serve infrastructure anywhere in the world, safely introducing AI-enabled applications — all of these large-scale goals rely on efficient, integrated underlying infrastructure.
With Itential, organizations can revolutionize the way their network and IT infrastructure supports business goals, today and tomorrow.
Learn how we’ve helped real-world customers achieve their goals
Ready to learn more? Take a tour of the Itential Automation Platform here, or check out this page for a full list of features and capabilities.
Tyler Lochan
Technical Content Specialist ‐ Itential
Tyler Lochan is a Technical Content Specialist at Itential. Tyler is a Georgia Tech grad who began his career as a technology consultant in financial services. He has a passion for bringing his technical expertise together with writing, and he focuses on creating content to support our customers as they navigate their network automation journeys.
