Name: Evaluating Network Automation Solutions: Top Criteria to Consider
Start: 2023-06-14T16:00:00Z
End: 2023-06-14T16:00:33.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 5

Itential is the leading SaaS-based platform for hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure, making it easy for enterprise organizations to reduce manual operations and simplify network management from Day 0/1 deployment, Day 2 changes, and beyond. The Itential Automation Platform accelerates your journey from task-based automations to orchestrated processes. 

In the fast-evolving telecom industry, launching innovative offerings and optimizing existing services is not just an objective; it’s a critical necessity. To accelerate time-to-revenue and slash fulfillment overheads, communication service providers (CSPs) must minimize the time and expense of introducing new services and fast-track the evolution from fragmented, complex, error prone and manually intensive processes to fully automated service fulfillment.

By connecting ServiceNow to your infrastructure with Itential’s new ServiceNow OMT App, CSPs can accelerate their time to market by quickly incorporating orchestrated network services into their new and existing products, standing out in a competitive market.  

Itential’s multi-domain orchestration platform enables CSPs to create unique services that can combine their network capabilities with third party services and capabilities, such as cloud, security, and interconnect. When combined with ServiceNow’s industry leading order management solution, CSPs can quickly define innovative new services with the ability to scale order volumes and meet next-generation service complexity.

Join us for a live webinar where Morgan Stern, VP, Automation Strategy at Itential and Karan Munalingal, Head of Solutions Engineering at Itential will discuss and demo: 

• The robust capabilities of the Itential ServiceNow OMT app for service order management. 
• What both ServiceNow and Network teams can achieve by leveraging the two solutions together. 
• How to create a service specification and publish to ServiceNow catalog.
• How to incorporate Itential-published services into customer services.
• How to place an order through ServiceNow for the new service and how to orchestrate the fulfilment through the Itential Automation Platform.

Orchestrate Service Order Fulfillment with the Itential App for ServiceNow OMT

Service Providers and Large Enterprises who view network infrastructure as a resource to be offered as differentiated services to customers will face challenges in managing those services over the lifetime that they operate. When a service is initially deployed, it will require multiple network resources to be allocated and configured along with customer, service, and ticket identifiers associated with the service instance. As the service moves from one lifecycle stage to another, this data can change making it challenging to track and update, and when a service is cancelled some resources may not be deallocated if updated tracking hasn’t been maintained. 

To efficiently manage a multitude of complex network services at scale, organizations need stateful orchestration, which is the ability to automate any network changes, orchestrate end-to-end service processes, and flexibly update and track a multitude of different data types related to each service.

Whether it’s tracking details of a set of network devices, like VLANs, IP Addresses or ACLs, or managing intricate network services that span routers, firewalls, cloud, and IT systems, Itential’s Lifecycle Manager (LCM) can help. With LCM, teams are able to leverage stateful orchestration to keep tabs on infrastructure resources, critical details, and current statuses for all services by using workflows to automate common management processes and keep resource information up to date.

Join us for a live discussion and demo where Peter Sprygada and Rich Martin will show you how to:

• Understand LCM’s Stateful Orchestration features and identify relevant use cases.
• Create a Resource Model for tracking data for a service.
• Associate a workflow to an Action that will operate on a service instance.
• Manage a service’s lifecycle process using Create, Update, and Delete Actions.
• Review a network service’s details and history throughout its lifetime.

Itential's Stateful Orchestration Capabilities: Deploy & Manage Network Services

IT organizations spend a significant amount of effort keeping up with changing application and infrastructure requirements, which often requires changes to network infrastructure such as firewall rule access, load balancer provisioning, etc. This process can take longer than anticipated due to manual processes required to coordinate between app, network, and infrastructure changes. This can create a serious time lag on productivity and velocity. With Itential’s latest release of its ServiceNow App, Application teams are now enabled to self-serve network and infrastructure services as a fully automated processes – bridging the gap between IT Apps and the network. 

This new release introduces Itential Actions that can be directly embedded in a ServiceNow Flow. These Actions give ServiceNow teams access to a self-service catalog that enables their IT processes to directly gather operational network data, request new network resources, or orchestrate changes across multiple network domains. This means that any IT request that experiences delays due to manual network processes can now be automated as easily as other IT resources, enabling you to deliver IT services at maximum efficiency.

Join us for a live demo where Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you how to:

• Publish an automation in Itential to provide self-service infrastructure in ServiceNow.
• Build a Flow that queries network inventory and operational data for dynamic use in ServiceNow.
• Build a Flow to qualify network resource availability for a new service or site.
• Build a Flow to provision a new network service as part of a larger IT request process.
• Understand how Itential Actions enable self-service automation through Example Flows.

Itential ServiceNow App: Network & Infrastructure Automation in ServiceNow Flow

Network as a Service (NaaS) is gaining momentum as cloud service consumers have come to expect their network providers and teams to offer the same simple level of accessibility they’ve become accustomed to in the cloud world. However, many have learned that delivering networking capabilities as a service presents significant challenges that don’t exist in cloud networking.

Exposing network services based on functionality like IP layer 3, core networking, optical, and functions like firewall and load balancing depend on a network infrastructure that can be managed and orchestrated across silos and domains with consistent, predictable capabilities that are robust enough to be exposed as services.

In this webinar, Itential’s Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy, and Travis Nicks, Solution Architect, will discuss the challenges of providing true hybrid, multi-cloud Network as a Service along with lessons learned from NaaS implementations in some of the most advanced service provider and enterprise networks in the world.

Join us to learn: 

• Key capabilities required to deliver robust NaaS.
• Challenges of orchestrating exposable hybrid network services.
• Lessons learned in enterprise and service provider NaaS initiatives.

Deliver Network as a Service Capabilities Across Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Selecting a network automation and orchestration solution that meets your organization’s needs can be difficult. As the number of tools that claim to enable network automation increases, it’s becoming more complex to determine the capabilities you need and select the right tool for the right job.

When adopting a network automation solution, your organization needs to be sure that the investment is worthwhile — many options have challenging limitations which may only become clear down the line. That’s why it’s critical for organizations to understand what they’re trying to automate and build a cohesive strategy around it, so they can evaluate the right network automation solution to achieve their goals.

In this webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, will share how organizations can evaluate the right network automation solution to implement for success. You’ll learn:  

• How to define the network change process and build an automation strategy that supports your business needs. 
• Which capabilities you should expect of any modern solution to help expose, enhance, and extend your automations.
• The 10 most important criteria to consider when comparing and evaluating your network automation options and the right questions to ask for each. 
• Red flags to avoid and why.

Evaluating Network Automation Solutions: Top Criteria to Consider

Both on-prem & cloud network infrastructure are critical for companies to deliver services faster to customers, but managing & securing this important resource requires infrastructure & security teams to identify issues quickly & react immediately to avoid outages or breaches. Manually identifying these events from massive amounts of infrastructure telemetry data & responding with manual processes increases outage times & security risk. Infrastructure & Security teams require tools that can identify & prioritize critical events & immediately run automated responses across all infrastructure.

Today, you can leverage Kentik’s ability to collect cloud & network telemetry data & generate intelligent alerts based on your organization’s requirements. When integrated with Itential, these alerts can immediately trigger an automation for the entire end-to-end remediation process, which can include updating infrastructure, managing incident response processes, & notifying teams. Combining both platforms enables enterprises to build closed-loop automations that respond to security & infrastructure events in real time.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing, Itential & Leon Adato, Principal, Technical Evangelism at Kentik, will demonstrate how to utilize the Kentik Observability Platform with the Itential Automation Platform to build automations that rapidly respond to cloud, network, or security infrastructure events & update teams & critical IT systems. You’ll see how to: 

• Leverage Kentik to generate Alerts for AWS infrastructure & trigger an Itential automation.
• Acknowledge the Alert Event in Itential, extract & transform data provided by Kentik platform.
• Automate the Change Request & Incident processes in ServiceNow for audit & documentation.
• Validate data & automate logic to update AWS Security Group or determine another course of action.
• Update Infrastructure & Security teams of the event & the automated response in MS Teams.

How to Build Closed-Loop Automation in Response to Infrastructure Events

For organizations ready to take the final step in their network automation journey, they’re looking to evolve from process orchestration to self-serve networking. Self-serve networking exposes the process orchestrations already built to a larger set of end users, providing capabilities like Network as a Service via APIs. 

The business impact of this transition is significant. Organizations who succeed with implementing self-service can provide the best experience for end users and customers, delivering more services in less time across their complex hybrid, distributed infrastructure.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough: 

• How the transition to self-service networking becomes a benefits force multiplier.
• The components of a self-service model and the tools and technologies that enable it.
• Lessons learned by teams who have successfully transitioned to self-service networking.
• How Itential supports self-service with its northbound API exposure capabilities.  
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve to make your automations become self-service for end users.
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for self-service networking success.

Network Automation Maturity: From Process Orchestration to Self-Serve Networking

Network teams are spending more and more time building automations for their day-to-day tasks – scripts and other assets that are intended to be used personally, or among a very small group of trusted team members. However, most are seeing the need to expand the audience who can run these automations to increase the efficiency of their organization’s IT operations. This can be accomplished by exposing what the team has already built to other applications and platforms. The question is, how can you do this safely at scale? 

To do this successfully, network teams need a platform that enables them to quickly create network automations that they trust, and securely publish these automations to be consumed by other teams, applications, and platforms. The Itential Automation Platform provides all the tools needed for network teams to confidently build and expose their network automations as services that can be run from IT systems like ServiceNow or as part of a DevOps Pipeline.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Build and publish a workflow for use by the network team.
• Build and publish a workflow for use by end users in ServiceNow. 
• Build and publish a workflow for use in a DevOps pipeline.
• Utilize Operations Manager for access control, data validation, and job auditing.

How to Publish & Expose Network Automations as a Service to Accelerate Adoption

Individuals and teams that are ready to take the next step from networking and infrastructure task automation, are looking to evolve to the next phase of their network automation maturity – process orchestration. This takes automation a step further to encompass the full end-to-process surrounding networking tasks such as responding to or closing an IT ticket, performing configuration validation, and communicating with sources of truth.  

However, when assessing the best route to evolve teams quickly to this next stage, they realize that the tools which enabled their success in automating tasks lack the capabilities required to orchestrate end-to-end processes at scale. 

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough: 

• Why teams should consider process orchestration and the benefits it can bring.
• The challenges and opportunities involved in the transition. 
• The challenges involved with moving to process orchestration from a task-based approach.
• Lessons learned by teams who have successfully transitioned to process orchestration.
• How Itential helps you evolve your automations to touch every part of the process with its patented integration capabilities. 
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve your automation efforts to encompass end-to-end processes. 
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for process orchestration success.

Network Automation Maturity: Evolving Task Automation to Process Orchestration

GitHub is an incredibly popular platform that is primarily used by programmers to collaborate, track, and share files and code for projects they are working developing and maintaining. Because of features like file sharing, versioning, and tracking GitHub has also found popularity with a multitude of groups outside of developers. In fact, more and more networking teams who are looking to automate network processes find that they need to have a common data source for network information — and GitHub is one of those platforms they turn to in order to implement that source of truth for network data like ACLs, inventory, and more.

With the Itential Automation Platform, integration with GitHub (and any platform, tool, or system) can be accomplished quickly with just a few clicks and will open up the entire library of API methods that can now be used in a network automation that you can build in a low-code, drag-and-drop workflow canvas.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Technical Marketing Engineer at Itential, will demonstrate how to integrate GitHub with the Itential Automation Platform to use for network automation. In this live demo, we will step-by-step how to:

• Quickly generate an integration with GitHub with OpenAPI.
• Investigate API methods from GitHub and use them as Tasks.
• Build a workflow to Create, Read, and Update files from a GitHub repo.
• Utilize files from GitHub as a data source for common network information.

How to Use GitHub as a Common Data Source for Network Automations with Itential

The first step for every network team getting started with network automation is to create automations for individual activities. As network engineers start to investigate automation, their initial thoughts usually revolve around “what” tasks to automate and “how” they can automate those tasks. This is an incredibly helpful and useful first step into automation, and with the right tools and frame of reference, a lot of a network engineer’s daily backlog can be overcome. When these first steps are taken, it’s important to also find ways to effectively manage your automations and engage and collaborate with other team members around these automation assets.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will share insights gathered from their time spent working with our customers who have implemented task-based automation successfully, including: 

• Assessing use cases, automation tools, time, and skills. 
• Expected benefits of implementing task-based automations.
• Required toolset capabilities to successfully manage and run your automations.
• Lessons learned from teams who have been successful with task automation.
• How Itential can help organize, share, and secure your scripts for extended use. 
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve your task automation efforts. 
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for task automation success.

Network Automation Maturity: Evolving from Limited to Task Automation

As a network engineer, the fun part of the job (and what you were actually hired to do) is real network engineering and making the network operate more securely and efficiently. However, the reality is that making changes to the network also requires that we document those changes in great detail — both before and after the changes are made. Now that network uptime, performance, and security are more important than ever, process and documentation are also critical, and many times network teams spend more time opening, updating, and documenting issues in platforms like Jira than they do working on the network. 

By integrating the Itential Automation Platform with the Jira Work Management platform, network teams can reclaim valuable time by automating these manual steps, freeing them up to continue to improve the network and positively impact everything that utilizes the infrastructure.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Technical Marketing Engineer at Itential, will show step-by-step how to save time and effort by automating the change management process that surrounds network changes as well as the changes themselves:

• Generate an integration to Jira Work Management Cloud Platform.
• Create new issues and set initial fields using a Data Transformation.
• Update comments on issues with network details captured from pre- and post-check tasks.
• Automate transitions to progress an issue’s status from open to completion.

How to Integrate Jira with Itential to Automate Change Management Process

Overall adoption of network automation and orchestration has grown steadily in the past few years, but within and across an organization, the rate of adoption can vary greatly. Clear patterns have begun to emerge. Individuals begin with scripts to automate tasks. Those can then grow into larger automations, usually with team-wide participation, and in some cases evolve into end-to-end orchestrations and self-service. As the approach to automation evolves, its benefits can expand in scope across the organization. 

Based on direct experience working with hundreds of teams and the observations of thousands of projects across the community, Itential experts have developed the Network Automation & Orchestration Maturity Model. The purpose of the model is to define consistent stages that can be used to measure progress in automation and orchestration teams and initiatives, which will help engineers and business leaders alike to maximize the impact of automation and orchestration. 

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough: 

• Why maturity models matter in emerging technology areas. 
• How engineers and teams can use the maturity model to improve their successes in automation. 
• How business leaders can use the maturity model to measure their current capabilities and improve their long-term automation strategies.

Intro to the Network Automation Maturity Model: How to Assess Where You Are

Getting started with automating network infrastructure requires a logical, step-by-step approach. You should start simple with a relevant use case and translate the process into a series of logical tasks. Then, you can build out integrations and surrounding processes to ensure it works with your infrastructure and meets your standards. Last, you will implement your tasks until the workflow is complete. 

In the fifth part of this demo series on how to build automated workflows with Itential, we will conclude by showing you how to publish a workflow in Operations Manager to extend the use of automation across your organization both for Itential users and the networking team’s end users. We’ll explore the four different trigger methods that initiate these shared workflows and how each can work in your environment.  

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to: 

• Publish a workflow for self-service by another Itential user within the platform. 
• Publish a workflow with an API endpoint to run outside the Itential platform such as end users in ServiceNow or GitLab. 
• Publish a workflow on a schedule for recurring tasks. 
• Publish a workflow to respond to an event for immediate execution and response.

Building Network Automations: Publishing & Sharing Automations

Getting started with automating network infrastructure requires a logical, step-by-step approach. You should start simple with a relevant use case and translate the process into a series of logical tasks. Then, you can build out integrations and surrounding processes to ensure it works with your infrastructure and meets your standards. Last, you will implement your tasks until the workflow is complete. 

In the fourth part of this demo series on how to build automated workflows with Itential, we will continue building on the previous workflow. Now that you can fully automate your use case end-to-end, it’s time to take it a step further and explore how you can build flexible and reusable content pieces that can be standardized and centralized for maximum control and compliance for end-to-end network automation.  

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to: 

• Build modular child workflows for common processes that can be reused by other team members in other workflows. 
• Use a ServiceNow integration for common tasks like ‘Open and Update Change Request Tickets’. 
• Access MS Teams integration to notify teams of an automation’s status. 
• Leverage Data Transformations for formatting data between workflows. 
• Extend current workflow to use any modular, child workflows.

Building Network Automations: Building Your Modular Automation Library

With network automation and orchestration gaining momentum, network teams are beginning to realize initial benefits in productivity and efficiency gains. At the same time, they are learning about the very real limitations of some of their automation tools to scale across different technologies and integrate with the network domains, systems, tools, and portals within their own environment. 

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Karan Munalingal, Head of Solutions Engineering, will discuss Itential’s patented innovations in integration, federation, and data transformation that are enabling network and IT teams to break through the limitations of point solutions to begin automating and orchestrating at scale.

During the session, Morgan and Karan will discuss:

• Limitations of domain specific tools and why they should only be one part of your automation strategy.
• How Itential’s two recently granted patents unlock the ability to extend the benefits of orchestration across technologies and domains.
• How teams can evolve their automation and orchestration strategies to accelerate business value and unlock new opportunities.

Itential’s Patented Integration Accelerates Network Automation & Orchestration

Enterprise networking has undergone several recent periods of transformation regardless of the scale of network infrastructure and how automation is implemented. The earliest evolution was on-premises automation with tooling like Python, Ansible, and Jenkins. Then the rise of cloud-native networking expanded the scope for connectivity beyond sites, data centers, and SD-WAN, right into the cloud itself. Going forward, we see an evolving enterprise architecture pattern that includes use of multi-cloud network environments and a wide variety of integration with clients & technology partners securely, creating new challenges to solve.

For S&P Global, the journey to multi-cloud networking has highlighted the necessity for an innovative approach, while at the same time, it presents exciting opportunities. Using pioneering technologies like Itential for network automation, and Alkira for connecting their multi-cloud networks, S&P Global has been able to transform into industry-leading network architecture pattern. They also fully leveraged abstraction and orchestration capabilities to make the most of the flexibility of a multi-cloud and solved challenges related to agility, integration, and security. 

In this live webinar, speakers from S&P Global, Alkira, and Itential will walk through how S&P uses Cloud Networking-as-a-Service to dramatically simplify multi-cloud network architecture and introduce scale at an unprecedented pace with automation and orchestration, and how business and tech leaders can understand:
• The importance of the integration layers for future-proofing network solutions and enabling business for the future.
• Why it’s critical to ensure network technology decisions are driven by business and technology needs, not cost, technical debt, or integration challenges.
• How to approach security, as networks continue to grow and change.

S&P Global’s Multi-Cloud Network Transformation Journey With Itential & Alkira

Network and security teams spend time daily creating and updating security rules on Palo Alto firewalls to control network access to different applications and services. In many organizations, the rate of change is very high and making these changes manually takes a significant amount of time, creating a backlog of work that prevents users from accessing much needed applications and services. Automating these manual processes are critical to overcome this bottleneck, but interfacing with Panorama APIs is a daunting task with traditional automation tools.

The Itential Automation Platform provides network teams with a unified, integrated set of tools to quickly build automations for every network domain, including the day-to-day creation and changes of firewall rules. By leveraging the freely available resources in Itential’s Pre-Built Collection along with the platform’s low-code workflow canvas, network teams can automate these processes to reduce change backlog and deliver service connectivity more efficiently.

In this live demo, Jerry Dollens, Senior Solutions Architect at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Utilize Itential’s Pre-Built Adapter for rapid integration to Palo Alto’s Panorama.
• Review and utilize a JSON Form for user input.
• Review and utilize a Data Transformation for an API call to Panorama.
• Create a workflow to automate Rule Creation using these assets together.
• Publish the workflow and run the automation, using a JSON Form for data input.

Automating Palo Alto Panorama Security Rule Creation with Itential

Network Automation

Automation

IT Automation

Enterprise IT

Orchestration

Network Architecture

Network Infrastructure

IT Infrastructure

Integration

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Evaluating Network Automation Solutions: Top Criteria to Consider

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