Automation that Enables Self-Service: Network as a Service

Itential’s integration and orchestration capabilities make it easy to for networking teams to expose network services for self-service consumption by IT and App teams.

Your Challenges

Within most organizations, cloud networking has reset expectations around the ease and speed of networking. Cloud users have become accustomed to consuming cloud network infrastructure as an on-demand service – easy to order and available for immediate use. IT teams have used a similar model to make it easier to consume internal resources like storage and compute, but network infrastructure has been slower to evolve.

The ability to offer a compelling self-service network functionality comparable to offerings of the cloud providers has been difficult to overcome due to:

The complexity of orchestrating network changes across multiple vendors and infrastructure domains.
Disparate domain-specific software tools and stacks to manage network infrastructure.
Reliance on network subject matter experts and manual efforts to create and manage network services.
Dependence on traditional tools that are technically complex and time-consuming.

THE SOLUTION

How Itential Enables Network as a Service

One key aspect of offering self-service networking is the ability to easily orchestrate across multiple systems in your organization. The Itential Platform’s unique integration capabilities enable organizations to quickly connect with their network, IT systems, and cloud platforms, providing a simplified approach to managing those integrations over time. Once your systems are integrated, your network teams can get started building workflows in a low-code canvas that can make changes to network and cloud infrastructure and utilize any IT systems necessary to provision new network services.

Itential’s capabilities make it easy to consume and enable self-service networking:

Integrate with Anything in Your IT Ecosystem

Without a single line of code, teams can quickly build integrations with your network, cloud, and IT systems, add new integrations as needed, and easily manage all of them over time. These integrations enable the platform to orchestrate any activity, even those that previously required engineers to manually log in to devices, applications, and inventory systems.

Ingest & Expose Existing Automations

Easily integrate existing scripts, Ansible Playbooks, Terraform Plans, etc. and make them available as a service. Teams can immediately evolve their existing scripts into self-service style offerings.

Rapidly Build New End-to-End Workflows via Low-Code

Quickly and easily develop powerful orchestrations using the low-code workflow design studio and expose those orchestrations for consumption as a network service. Using the design studio, network subject matter experts can replicate even the most complex network engineering logic on a simple graphical canvas.

Integrate Sources of Truth & Service Assurance

Itential’s integrations with external systems like sources of truth and service assurance systems enable teams to incorporate SLAs and performance assurance into their self-service offerings, allowing users to customize services the same way they consume cloud provider services – they can select high-guarantee services for mission-critical use cases, while retaining the option for lower-SLA services when appropriate.

Create & Expose a Catalog of NaaS Services

Workflows built in Itential that provision network services can be published via the Automation Catalog capability of the platform. The catalog can expose any of the capabilities of the platform, including ingested scripts and playbooks, functionality provided via integrations, or orchestrations developed within the design canvas.
How to Publish & Expose Network Automations as a Service with Itential

Offer Services the Way Users Want to Consume Them

This self-service catalog can be exposed to internal and external customers, making it easy for users to discover and request new capabilities in whatever method they need to – including APIs, portals, CI/CD pipelines, ticketing systems, ordering systems and more.

Regardless of how the end users want to consume the self-service networking capabilities, the Itential platform has the flexibility and capability.
NetDevOps, Self-Service, & Evolving the Network Change Process to be Consumable by Everyone

For API Users
Teams can expose automation and orchestration capabilities through Itential’s OpenAPI 3.1interface, which provides additional tools for developers to view and test API calls through a visual interface prior to launch.
Explore Itential’s API Docs

For CI/CD Users
The Itential Platform includes integrations with a wide variety of CI/CD tooling and pipelines, enabling DevOps teams to quickly incorporate powerful network automations and orchestrations as part of their pipelines.
Explore Itential’s CI/CD Solution

For Users of IT Systems like ServiceNow
Itential provides a native ServiceNow application to streamline the ability of teams to create and offer powerful self-service networking to ServiceNow users.
Explore Itential’s ServiceNow App