Today’s Modern Campus Network
Campus networks have evolved in performance and complexity as the needs and requirements of users have increased. Traditional wired network solutions for the campus have started to take on more complex architectures that help deliver stability, performance, and security to users. Modern campus wireless solutions have achieved higher performance, reliability, and security by adopting a controller to act as a single brain for the wireless domain. These changes have made deploying, maintaining, and securing the modern campus network more of a challenge than in the past. Network teams must ensure that complex network configurations are deployed quickly and error-free and changes made to that infrastructure later are correct and never violate security standards.
Automating & Orchestrating Campus Networks
Automation and orchestration can help in deploying new campus IDF and MDF network switches and routers faster and with fewer errors. Orchestrating network changes across wired and wireless networks helps teams get the changes done more quickly, ensure compliance, and free teams from opening, updating, and closing change request tickets.
Outcomes
Deploy Faster
Optimize time to deploy new routers, switches, and wireless access points.
Reduce Change Backlog
Orchestrate day-to-day network changes at scale, increasing efficiency and mitigating manual errors.
Reduce Security Risks
Incorporate compliance validation to reduce security risks.
Document Changes
Document changes by orchestrating change request process.
Itential Campus Automation & Orchestration Use Cases
- Streamline Day 0/1 Device Onboarding & Deployment
Zero-touch deployment and provisioning for IDF and MDF devices, routers, switches, and wireless controllers and access points.
Learn More - Ensure Configuration Standardization & Compliance
Configuration compliance checks, automated remediation, and network change validation for any campus network devices, routers, switches, or wireless controller and access points.
Learn More - Simplify Day 2 Change Management
Orchestration of maintenance windows and configuration changes, including fully automated pre- and post-checks with intelligent analytics.
Learn More - Orchestrate Across Multi-Domain, Multi-Vendor Networks
Itential mitigates the complexity of managing multiple network types and vendors by consuming and federating the systems and networks managed by those systems, abstracting the complexity from the user for simplified orchestration.
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Hear From Our Customers
Armstrong Automates & Accelerates Infrastructure Service Delivery
Armstrong World Industries faced a growing backlog of service requests and the limitations of their homegrown orchestration system. By adopting Itential’s event-driven platform, they automated workflows, integrated tools like ServiceNow, and reduced service delivery times from days to minutes while achieving measurable ROI.
Customer Quote
Users now get faster service delivery because Itential automates the entire process. What used to take days now takes minutes, and that’s a massive improvement for us.
Eric Anderson
Senior Infrastructure Architect at Armstrong
Major U.S. Airline Leverages Itential to Automate Software Upgrades, Reduces Time from 4 Months to 4 Hours
With a nationwide device inventory of over 3,500 Cisco IOS devices, this major U.S. airline needed to ensure network OS upgrades on a consistent basis. Typically, their network team only had the capacity to perform software upgrades once every 18 months, creating significant security concerns.
Customer Quote
Before Itential, our best engineer took 4 months to write an Ansible script for upgrades that, with Itential we had working by lunch.
Manager of Network Engineering
Major U.S. Airline
Building an Automation Factory to Transform Network Service Delivery
By implementing an Automation Factory Model with the Itential Platform at the core of their strategy, Colt was able to rapidly and successfully progress their automation journey to enable true end-to-end orchestration. This has resulted in increased velocity to roll out many high-impact use cases without having to reskill their team.
Customer Quote
For Colt, we have standardized our operations on Itential as their workflow based solution allows us to run all of those workflows and ingest many different types of APIs with a fairly high ease of use.
Joan Espin Garcia
Director of Network Platforms & Solutions Architecture, Colt
RUSH Automates NetOps to Respond Quickly to Critical IT Needs & On-Demand Patient Care
The RUSH University Medical Center team tackled their challenges of supporting a sprawling network that supports three hospitals and over 30 remote sites by adopting Itential to reduce operational bottlenecks, streamline mundane tasks, and respond quickly to critical IT needs — improving the efficiency of healthcare delivery while maintaining patient safety.
Customer Quote
The game-changer for us with Itential is how it abstracts the complexity of automation. In the past, scripting and automation were intimidating because they required you to be a programmer first and a network engineer second. But with Itential, you don’t need to be a developer to create impactful automations. You can take building blocks and create workflows that solve real problems quickly and effectively, without the need for manual intervention.
Uzair Khan
Manager of Network Services, RUSH University Medical Center
Leading Health Insurance Provider Sunsets Legacy HPNA, Reduces Device Backups from Hours to Minutes with Itential
With a network spanning 16,000 devices, this leading health insurance provider needed to move away from its legacy HPNA system to streamline operations. Previously, device backups took hours to complete, creating operational inefficiencies. By adopting Itential, they automated and accelerated backups, reducing execution time from hours to minutes while modernizing their network management approach.
Customer Quote
I think that Itential is everything we want to do that HPNA couldn’t do right out-of-the-box.
Senior Network Engineer, Leading Health Insurance Provider
Rapid Automation & Orchestration of Campus Networks with the Itential Platform
Itential supports automation and orchestration across all major network vendor’s campus solutions, whether they are using traditional CLI-based configurations or whether configuration is accomplished using GUI dashboards on a controller, like most wireless solutions today. Whether you are deploying all new campus routers, switches, and access-points or making changes to existing networks, you can quickly build innovative orchestrated workflows for any use case and easily integrate with your organization’s IT systems such as ServiceNow or Infoblox, to save more time and reduce manual effort.
Itential helps your team overcome the skills gap of automation and orchestration with the following features:
Low-Code Workflow Canvas
Drag-and-drop workflow canvas for network engineers and non-programmers to build integrated workflows that enable the orchestration of any CLI-based network devices and API cloud services.
Configuration Management & Validation
Federate inventory of network CLI devices and API services together for easy visibility and manage configurations of anything in the inventory. Quickly create and manage Golden Configuration templates that can be used to validate changes for compliance against traditional CLI devices and modern API services.
Bring Your Own Automation
Whether it’s using Python, Ansible, Terraform or any other technology, Itential allows you to take any existing automations and integrate them into the Itential Platform so they can be augmented with pre- and post-check processes and integrated with any common IT systems like ServiceNow, Infoblox, and Slack.
No-Code Integration with Everything
Integrate operational processes and connect your entire IT ecosystem such as ticketing, change management, inventory, network applications (DNS, monitoring, load balancing), IPAMs, ITSMs, messaging and more with Itential’s library of open integrations to 300+ systems.
Pre-Built Workflows for Campus Use Cases
Increase the networking team’s productivity right out the gate by leveraging orchestrations from Itential’s growing library of Pre-Built Workflows and assets. The library includes many ready-to-run campus automations like software upgrades, device onboarding, and network device changes that can help network teams overcome change backlog and free up more time.
Learn More with Itential Content
Blogs
- More Impact, Same Effort: Orchestrating Your Automations
- What’s the Difference Between Network Automation & Network Orchestration?
- Automating Network Changes from Ticket Creation to Ticket Closure
- Dispelling 3 Common Network Automation Myths
- Understanding the Direct & Indirect Value Drivers of Network Automation
- Why Build AND Buy Is the Model for Network Automation Success
- operationalizing network automation & enabling team-oriented development with torero
Other Resources
- Network Automation & Orchestration Evaluation Guide
- Deutsche Telekom Automates Software Upgrades, Increases Operational Efficiency with Itential
- Itential Platform Demo Overview
- Major U.S. Airline Leverages Itential to Automate Software Upgrades, Reduces Time from 4 Months to 4 Hours
- How to Publish & Expose Network Automations as a Service with Itential
- Building Network Automations: Introduction to Itential’s New Workflow Canvas
Get Started with Itential
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