De-Risking Network Automation By Integrating with Itential

Today’s networks are too complex for manual network management and updates. With most enterprises composed of tens of thousands of devices spanning multiple geographical locations, on-premises hardware, Virtual environment, and multiple clouds – it’s virtually impossible to push updates manually. Also – the sheer volume of vendors and coding languages can be overwhelming for a […]

Today’s networks are too complex for manual network management and updates. With most enterprises composed of tens of thousands of devices spanning multiple geographical locations, on-premises hardware, Virtual environment, and multiple clouds – it’s virtually impossible to push updates manually. Also – the sheer volume of vendors and coding languages can be overwhelming for a network operations engineer. In most cases learning a new language or new platform takes eight weeks to achieve basic proficiency; its not realistic to expect human skills to scale at the pace of network innovation (aka network complexity)

Which is why we decided to integrate the Forward Networks platform with the industry-leading network assurance platform, Itential. Their low-code automation platform makes it easy for network operations teams to deploy and manage multi-domain infrastructures. Itential’s cloud-native software as a service offering provides a low-code interface that seamlessly connects to any IT system, cloud, or network technology for end-to-end closed-loop network automation and orchestration. Forward Enterprise enables network operators to deploy automated changes with the assurance that they are in compliance with network policies and won’t have any unintended side effects.

Fig 2. Closing the Loop: Automation + Verification

Forward Enterprise helps network operations engineers avoid outages through its unique mathematical model. The platform creates a digital twin of the network (across on-premises devices, private and public cloud) enabling network operators to map all possible traffic flows, instantly troubleshoot, verify intent, predict network behavior, and reduce MTTR (mean time to resolution). Itential simplifies and accelerates the deployment and management of multi-domain network infrastructure. Both platforms support major network equipment vendors and AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms.

Fig 3. Automate Service Provisioning with Forward Networks and Itential

The Closed Loop Automation process enabled by the integration of Forward Networks Platform and Itential Automation Platform (IAP) acts as a safeguard to prevent any issues from becoming pervasive following a change window. Using the pre-built automations, templates, form builder, automation builder within Automation Studio makes it easy for network operations engineers to build an automation catalog that enables changes at scale. By using the API integration with Forward Networks, they can verify routing, add intent checks, verify new service connectivity, check for side effects and send notifications and verifications via Slack, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEX, and email. Integration with change management systems including ServiceNow and Jira ensure everyone is working from a single source of truth and expedites collaboration. In the event of an issue, the diff check functionality within the Forward Networks platform makes it easy to pinpoint which changes are causing any unplanned behavior.

For more detail on how the integration works, please view our ONUG Spring 2021 session.

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Chiara Regale

Chiara Regale is the SVP of Product and User Experience at Forward Networks. Prior to Forward, Chiara was a Director of Product Management for the Insieme business unit at Cisco Systems. She was also a Director of Product Management at Riverbed Technology.