In most organizations, the deployment of new applications creates significant workload on the network team. Every new application poses some connectivity and security requirements that network teams are not able to verify at the fast pace required by the business.
At a global card payment processor, the network team was required to vet network connectivity requirements in terms of destination IPs, protocols and ports for every new application to roll-out. To accelerate this process, the engineering team had developed a “firewall checker” tool that application team was encouraged to use directly, in order to know whether the proper ports on a given firewall were configured properly for the new application. This tool however was not designed to provide network-level information and was very difficult to keep up-to-date with new vendors, new OS versions, and new technologies.
Forward Enterprise changes the way application developers need to interact with network teams, and greatly accelerates the new application deployment workflow. Either with an intuitive user interface or via REST APIs, application teams with limited networking knowledge can now quickly access and interpret the network information they need to turn applications into deployment. By providing source and destination addresses, Forward Search feature returns a detailed path view of all devices in the path, relevant interfaces, with functions performed by that device and potential L4 port details.
Additionally, Forward Search feature supports a “permit all mode” function that ignores firewall rules and access lists completely, identifying if the firewall is blocking the traffic, or if the network doesn’t have the appropriate routing or switching infrastructure in place.
As a summary, Forward Enterprise not only reduces the burden the network teams have to face when receiving many tickets, but also delights the application developers who can now perform their job more efficiently
