Gaining Control of Network Data with Nautobot Single Source of Truth

Companies of all sizes continue to adopt network automation, but larger enterprise organizations have their challenges when it comes to managing the data that drives this change. There is no single data owner at most enterprises, so different teams and tools need to be integrated to generate the intended configured state of the network required for automation.

During one of our latest webinars, Network to Code’s John Anderson, Principal Consultant, and Christian Adell, Principal Architect, took a deep dive into the current state of enterprise network automation and the world of Nautobot Single Source of Truth (SSoT).

Read on to learn more about the challenges enterprises face with network automation and how Nautobot Single Source of Truth can help with network data management.

The Current State of Enterprise Network Automation

Network automation continues to evolve as organizations find innovative ways to deploy, manage, and consume their networks. Most network teams have adopted some form of scripting, but the shift to common operating models and more advanced management platforms is still not a reality for many organizations.

The way to move the enterprise network automation industry forward is focusing on data. Many organizations have already adopted sources of truth for inventory management, IP address management, configurations, and many other data requirements. In fact, EMA Research found that 63% of enterprises have multiple authoritative data repositories for different classes of information.

There’s no doubt that network Sources of Truth (SoTs) are now abundant. By 2023, Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprises will maintain an accurate Network Source of Truth within operations to enable automation initiatives. This requires a centralized view of network intent that utilizes all of these distributed sources of truth to drive network automation.

How Can We Manage Enterprise Network Data?

At the enterprise level, managing data is both a technical and business problem. Organizations have many different systems which deal with their network data, and this data needs to flow between these systems to support automation. From a business perspective, however, data ownership and governance is complex because of the need for regulatory compliance, audit trails, and other operational requirements.

A single source of truth (SSoT) approach is the foundation of enterprise data management because it can provide a centralized view of network intent while maintaining the distributed management of data sources. An SSoT platform can take numerous Sources of Truth—which are authoritative sources of data for particular domains—and aggregate this data into a single view. This is the key to overcoming both the technical and business challenges involved with scaling enterprise network automation.

Discover the World of Nautobot SSoT

Nautobot is a single source of truth and network automation platform that defines the intended state of the network. By adopting Nautobot for network automation, enterprise organizations can deploy a trusted source of data that facilitates good data hygiene.

More specifically, Nautobot allows organizations to define custom fields and their own unique relationships between data stored in the platform. It’s also an extensible platform that enables organizations to build their own custom apps to meet more specific business requirements using REST APIs, GraphQL, webhooks, or a plugin system.

The Single Source of Truth framework is the way the Nautobot platform facilitates integration and data synchronization between various source of truth (SoT) systems. There are many individual apps built atop this SSoT framework for seamlessly connecting with Infoblox, IP Fabric, ServiceNow, and other enterprise platforms. This framework approach is designed to make it easy for users to integrate Nautobot into their own unique environments to serve as a true single source of truth (SSoT).

In short, Nautobot streamlines enterprise network data management by unifying disparate data sources and creating a centralized single source of truth. This can help enterprise organizations adopt more advanced network automation platforms and processes that transform network operations, while still ensuring individual domains retain control of their data.