Hybrid infrastructure is amazing for scale — and brutal for compliance. Every router CLI, cloud API, or SD-WAN controller you add multiplies the ways in which a security hole is introduced, routing is impacted, or an SLA is broken. Industry studies routinely list misconfiguration among the top causes of major outages, and audit teams know drift is both inevitable and expensive.
Let’s explore four use cases we hear most from customers and how Itential’s Golden Configuration capabilities turns each one into a non-issue.
1️⃣ PCI-DSS Proof Panic: Screenshots, Spreadsheets & Sleepless Nights
For one global payments provider, preparing an annual PCI-DSS audit meant engineers spending days capturing screenshots of device configurations and pasting them into a document. Every interface, every protocol, every change ticket had to be located, labelled, and time-stamped — all by hand.
Where Itential Flips the Script
Itential’s orchestration and config compliance tools can translate PCI requirement into Compliance-as-code — run those checks automatically across routers, switches, firewalls, VMs, and controllers, then generate reports and assemble a document to provide to your QSA. Remediation workflows can even update non-compliant devices and attach evidence back into ServiceNow, so you’re never recreating history at 2 a.m.
Easily generate and export compliance plans for multi-vendor infrastructure with Configuration Manager.
2️⃣ Config Drift in Infrastructure: When Temporary Changes Become Permanent Problems
During a maintenance window, a firewall in a segmented retail network was “temporarily” set to enable HTTP traffic for troubleshooting. The temporary change was overlooked and became a permanent one. No alerts fired, but increased HTTP traffic causing spikes in server resources impacted latency with card-payment transactions, and the root-cause hunt burned many engineer hours and loss of revenue.
Where Itential Flips the Script
Scheduled compliance audits compare every running config to its golden baseline. The moment an insecure configuration sneaks back, Itential can launch a workflow that alerts security, server, and domain teams, opens tickets to document the problem, and rolls the changes back to its approved standard — within the same maintenance window. Customer experience stays intact, and disaster is averted.
Quickly update Golden Configuration Templates and run scheduled compliance audits.
3️⃣ One Policy, Ten Interfaces: Ban Telnet Everywhere with One Rule
“Disable insecure protocols like Telnet and HTTP” sounds easy until you realize the policy needs to be applied across IOS-XE, JunOS, SD-WAN APIs, Linux firewalls, BIG-IP iRules, and AWS Security Groups. Most teams juggle three to five point tools just to keep that single rule aligned.
Where Itential Flips the Script
Write the requirement once as a compliance standard and Itential can render the correct CLI or API syntax for every device, OS, or platform and push the changes through an orchestrated workflow — no copy-paste gymnastics. Verification steps can run immediately, so you see a green “Pass” badge across multiple domains in real time.
Build Golden Configurations for API-managed infrastructure for consistent compliance across all infrastructure.
4️⃣ Enterprise-Scale Standardization: 12,000 Devices, Zero Drift
A large utilities company had to keep 12,000+ devices in lock-step while juggling multiple sources of truth. Slow manual methods not only risked regulatory fines; they were physically impossible with the existing team.
Where Itential Flips the Script
Inventory synchronizes with any CMDB and other data sources, baselines every device, and orchestrates bulk fixes in controlled waves. In this utilities case, audit-prep time shrank from weeks to hours, inventory sources are always up to date, and thousands of device configurations are auditing with automatic remediation — no extra headcount required.
Integrate with all of systems of record and use workflows that can keep everything in sync.
The Golden Configuration Loop in Action
All four stories share the same five-phase backbone.
Itential automates each phase and stitches them into an always-on loop, so consistency isn’t an annual project — it’s a daily background task.
- Discover & Baseline: Leverage inventory, config backup, plus config diff tasks to build the initial “Golden Config” templates.
- Template & Validate: Compliance-as-code abstracts every policy standard into reusable templates across multiple domains and runs scheduled drift checks to generate reports.
- Remediate. Orchestrated workflows fix violations, update ITSM tickets, and seal the audit trail automatically.
Once that loop is live, outages linked to misconfigurations drop, audit prep becomes a click, and engineers reclaim hours every week to focus on keeping everything running securely.
Are You One Drift Away from a Headline?
If your team is still screenshot-hunting, diff-grepping, and copy-pasting, it’s time to trade fight-or-flight for automated assurance.
📗 Read the Golden Config white paper to dive deeper →
🖥️ Check out this webinar for advice on how to tackle config chaos →
Rich Martin
Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential
Rich Martin is the Director of Technical Marketing at Itential. Previously, Rich has worked at several networking vendors as a both a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager but started his career with a background in software development and Linux. He has a passion for automation in the networking domain, and at Itential he helps networking teams to get started quickly and move forward successfully on their network automation journey.
