Configuration Management

How to Achieve Operational Consistency Across Your Entire Network

Karan Munalingal

Head of Solutions Engineering ‐ Itential

How to Achieve Operational Consistency Across Your Entire Network
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Posted on March 30, 2021

Recently, I had the opportunity to present at Networking Field Day 24 to cover a topic I help our customers solve every day – how to achieve operational consistency across their entire network, regardless of whether it’s physical, virtual, or cloud-based infrastructure. Recent innovations have posed a challenge for network teams that Itential is excited to solve in our recent product release.


Achieving Operational Consistency

Historically, NetOps teams have managed networks via a manual approach through the CLI, however, the network has now evolved beyond the typical data center, LAN, and WAN to encompass more software-defined domains such as cloud and SD-WAN. With this new shift in what the network entails, NetOps engineers still need to find a way to manage configuration, compliance, and remediation across their infrastructure and services regardless of the domain they reside in. Even though the networking concepts sound and seem similar across the network and cloud domains, the way you manage them is drastically different.

As the network evolves towards a more software-defined model, this shift is putting strain on network engineers to manage their networks through both CLI or API-based constructs. So, how do network teams manage operational consistency across this diverse ecosystem?


Building Trust and Confidence Through Automation

In order to achieve operational consistency at scale, automation is required. This is the only way your network can support the speed and efficiency needed to deliver and roll out new services to customers. And now that the network is not bounded to your data center anymore, there are different tools, technologies, and techniques across many vendors and domains that are required for its management. Network teams are now expected to manage both CLI and API-based technologies.

Trust and confidence is the main ingredient to begin implementing successful automation. But the biggest question is – How do I implement configuration, compliance, and validation around not just on my CLI devices, but API based services as well?

That’s the very question I answer in my presentation. Watch it here to see me demo how Itential enables NetOps and CloudOps teams within any organization to instill the confidence needed to accelerate automation efforts and achieve operational consistency across both network and cloud infrastructure.


Itential’s Configuration Manager

Ultimately, the entire process of configuration and compliance management can be easily automated by leveraging the Itential Automation Platform, with Configuration Management as the backbone. Itential is purpose-built to help networking teams, with little or no background in DevOps and CloudOps, deploy, manage, and maintain network infrastructure across their expanded networking domains, and help them confidently build automations they can trust to reduce their manual workload and provide a higher level of service to the organization.

To learn more about Itential’s modern approach to network configuration and compliance, watch our latest on-demand webinar, “Simplify Configuration & Compliance Management Across Network & Cloud.”

Karan Munalingal

Head of Solutions Engineering ‐ Itential

Karan Munalingal is the Head of Solutions Engineering at Itential. Previously, Karan ran systems engineering at Ciena, focusing on carrier ethernet and core switching platforms. At Itential, Karan drives automation strategy serving global customers transitioning to modern networks and software-defined network programmability.

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