Automation Excellence Webinar Series – Part 2: Modernizing Network Operations

hello and welcome into the automation Excellence webinar series part two always T take a minute for everyone to get joined in so just hang tight we’ll wait about one minute before we get started for those of you just joining we are waiting just a minute as we wait for folks to filter into the webinar we’ll get started in about one minute I do see everybody filtering into the room which is great to see thanks everyone that’s able to to attend with us today

uh we’re going to ahead and get started here so uh today we’re going through the automation Excellence webinar series part two uh modernizing network operations our agenda for the day we’re going to do some introductions we will then move into the topics which we’re talking about industry Trends uh future proofing the necessity of adoption of modernizing our networks the true cost of downtime and security breaches uh then we’ll take a look at using Nautobot as your bridge to intent based networking

following that up with uh Network to code and how Network to code can position is position to help you in your organization and then of course time for Q&A as always please do use the Q&A box there in Zoom that’s the best way to ask us questions we can make sure it gets answered for you we will either answer it live or we’ll give you a typed response and we will make sure we share it with the group as well so everyone can benefit from those questions that you might have

so as introductions my name is Tim Schreyack I am the director of sales engineering here at Network to Code and happy to go through you through with you today this webinar so we’re going to start off with our industry Trends uh programmability orchestration cloud and AI these are some of the things that we’re seeing uh as we work with our clients as well as as we observe the industry and help lead in this area as well so one of the trends we’re seeing a lot of is this move towards programmable networks the idea that

we should be able to control the network from things like apis uh and have the network equipment integrate seamlessly uh into our overall application stack allowing for us to have uh external logic to the way that we actually manipulate and make sure that our applications can communicate with each other this means that uh administrators or network operators no longer are having to go in necessarily Direct ly to the CLI to implement changes that are timec consuming and error prone

as an example right so consumption of operations is drastically simplified through the use of self-service portals so now because we have the programmability we’re able to take a users’s input of basic request of information and in some form of a portal whether that’s maybe perhaps itsm or other ways and then uh begin to implement that change following the standard business process that is expected in your organization some of the you know folks that we’re seeing

uh coming in with these types of changes and we’ll kind of go through an example here where where changes are expressed into this portal right and and then triggered as potentially as well as a a response to an event they can also then be operationalized with as little human intervention or even zero intervention as much as possible where we’re able to take this flow uh and then program it into the network who’s requesting these changes uh where where are these types

of uh interactions coming from you know traditionally we were largely seeing these types of changes from engineers and are more technical folks but as the ubiquity of applications and therefore the requirements from the network have grown what we’re seeing is that these kinds of request requests are instantiating from potentially just customers or non-technical folks or even like monitoring solution where it’s have some form of automation that’s requesting a change

and of course our partners are thirdparty Integrations and quite often what we see with these people that are asking for these things and they don’t even realize they’re asking for a network change they just know they need some application to function or they’re looking for some functionality that in underlying requires a network change in order to implement that they’re not even aware of that fact that’s something interesting to think about is that as we move into

this uh programmable world that there is this difference where we’re no longer seeing folks that necessarily know what they’re asking for really needing something done and that is a key difference as we move down this path we’re seeing a trend as well to the multicloud environment uh where organizations are moving to leveraging multiple Cloud environments uh whether it’s a public cloud or private cloud and then within the public Cloud which one uh this is becoming very popular

as well as our hybrid environments where we have a combination of on-prem private and public clouds of course maintaining these multiple Cloud infrastructures adds complexity uh each one of the public Cloud providers has a different method by which you control it they have different control planes and different management planes uh they have different methods their apis are different uh so being able to manage these adds complexity and we’re also seeing cloud-based it management tools

uh some of these are specifically from the vendors an example would be like Cisco ACI or moroi um and then we have other uh examples of our tools that are also moving to the cloud whether that’s cmdb or ipam itm are decent tools allowing us to operate more efficiently to gain uh speed and streamlining our operations because we’re no longer worrying about operating that specific tool we’re now just taking advantage of that tool itself and being able to leverage its functionality

uh this allows us to deploy more quickly uh we have very high availability available right out of the box we can scale up and down as needed uh without needing to worry about our infrastructure uh A major advantage of moving our control uh or management tools into Cloud infrastructure we’re also seeing as of course everyone is talking about now integration of AI Technologies I don’t think you can probably attend a webinar in the technal technical space right

now and not talk at least a little bit about AI uh and it is obviously going to be and is a game changer for us uh we are seeing this as well here uh in the source of Truth and network automation space as well so here’s some some topics we see uh automated decision-making uh due to our ai’s capability to analyze large amounts of data uh including say tickets or other inputs uh AI was able to make very educated decisions about how specific situation should be handled

uh obviously we are early in this adoption phase but it it’s going to see a way in which we can advance both our capability to respond to issues and provision our networks uh data collection and Analysis being able to interact with our uh logs and our data that we’re collecting from the network through natural language processing uh making it easier to find what we’re looking for uh that we can also be potentially also analyzing the data continuously

so not only can I evaluate as a human and ask for information back I can also rely on the AI and Lang model to be monitoring and Reporting things that are unusual potentially even responding to them fault prediction uh I think this is something really interesting where we’re able to potentially predict an issue is about to occur uh through anomalies that may have been ordinarily missed uh so we can notify administrators operators that hey there’s a problem coming um

and notice these subtle changes that may uh potentially be missed and therefore we can have predictive maintenances rather than reactive and then finally performance op optimization uh ability to plan for the future because we can predict more accurately where we’re going uh we can potentially get design suggestions and optimizations uh back from AI Solutions so this is a lot of what we’re seeing in this space as we uh evolve into an AI driven world

now future proofing the necessity of adoption uh we want to talk a little bit about here as far as as why and how should we move forward with these types of solutions that will save us money reduce risk and improve efficiency for us in our organizations so creating and maintaining Advanced technical capabilities uh some of the advantages we see right uh higher service availability if we are proactive with our fault detection automated provisioning and other advancements businesses are

now able to ensure that their services and their customers rely on enjoy higher availability seems relatively obvious uh we can be reduced time to deliver we can have a shorter time to deliver uh automated design and implementation practices reduce the time required to deliver new services to customers uh in some scenarios it’s it’s possible to deliver a requested service immediately after it’s been requested this will allow our businesses to capture value more quickly improving cashr enhanced adaptability to market trends

uh this is something we’re always uh being demanded of of the business that hey there is this Market Trend we’re going to shift the business and therefore the technical teams need to adapt uh we can now move more quickly uh to respond to those requests from the business uh reduce cost of delivery this is always a major paino for it organizations we’re trying to find ways to deliver more at a less cost uh automations can really deliver on that promise

uh EX for an example uh we can discover unused resources dynamically and help recover them quickly uh this is a common case where we already have infrastructure deployed we just don’t realize that it’s underutilized or not utilized at all and it’s available to us to consume we just need to better consume it it’s driving more efficiencies therefore reducing our cost of delivery uh increasing or enhancing our scalability and performance capabilities this allows us to ramp up

and down uh performance is also improved through deep is of the network to identify bolog and areas for improvement and then finally improve customer support uh automations allow us to provide immediate responses to customer needs whether it’s provisioning a new service uh troubleshooting existing service or helping their business uh our business adapt to changing requirements just an interesting quote here from Gartner uh Network automation requires a reliable Network source

of Truth this is something we see as well where organizations are beginning to realize this that hey if we’re going to be able to move forward and deliver on these promises that we talk about we’re going to have to have a network source of Truth at its core that is accurate and fundamental to everything else we do so moving on to modernizing our customer and employee interactions how can we uh adapt and and improve the way that we interface with the humans in the world

so our various personas here whether it’s our customers our Engineers or our non-technical employees we need to look at how we improve the interactions with those individuals so as we look at for example our customers uh our customers are asking for uh new Services there’s uh new businesses coming into to us uh they’re asking for service adjustments uh they want to make a change to their existing uh whatever application or solution they have from us or there’s a problem

and we need to troubleshoot how can we do that and prove that through things like self-service portals or internal platforms that are now able to communicate with each other via API therefore enabling those responses more quickly to either a new service or adjustment to their existing service for example on the engineering side uh we are requesting Network changes or looking for performance data or fault information often these things are a response to those things coming in from our customers

and we have similar types of solutions where we’re using again self-service portals or the it management platform and chat Bots combined to be able to inter interface with the technology to get the information back to the engineer more quickly more efficiently uh and then non-technical folks people that are helping us operate the the business side of the world right whether it’s user provisioning or actually implementing those new services for clients or customers

uh troubleshooting again similar types of solutions that we have different user personas though so even though the underlying platform may look the same we are implementing these such that they are appropriate for the individual consuming uh so the customer will see a different view than the engineer who in turn sees something different from our non-technical folks some of the benefits we see here for to the business particularly is reduced engineering effort

uh frees up Engineers time uh we can scale better uh improves our customer satisfaction this is really a great benefit here where we’re able to uh deliver our customers Solutions faster therefore improving customer satisfaction uh we can be more consistent as we have consistency in delivery and reducing our human effort uh therefore that reduces human error uh automation will obviously uh improve speed and therefore leading to less errors as we do this manually

uh some user benefits uh it’s just more convenient uh I don’t necessarily have to wait so long uh it’s more transparent I can actually see the information that I need uh more readily instead of having to go ask someone else and I am empowered to now go take on this work and do it myself particularly if I’m an engineer or a non-technical employee but even the same as a customer um without realizing it I’m actually doing some work myself by requesting something through a self service portal that automation

then delivers now as we move into why making the investment you know existing Network management practices uh are inefficient and and unreliable this is the reality of the world we operate in today uh we hold them together through just sheer human effort uh and this has led to kind of organically grown strategies and and solutions that are designed to address very short-term needs they’re very tactical as opposed to strategic so if if we look at an existing low right

uh where we typically see implementation of a request that’s happening in in many days uh we have the order submission uh there’s probably something missing so the first person to review that sends it back and asks for some additional information and we finally get that updated the engineer then reviews that and and sends it on for approval then we go into the approval review and and probably there’s something there that’s missing and that gets sent back again

uh we go through our approvals then finally we move on to let’s say our infos approval there’s something wrong there it goes back again maybe all the way back to the original requestor because they it got missed along the way finally we move into implementation we implement we have a failure on that we have to iterate till finally eventually we get to closing the ticket and this is just the reality right that might not happen on every ticket but it definitely happens on many

of them that we’re implementing where at least somewhere along the path we have a lot of overview a lot of repeating because of either inaccurate data insufficient data or there was just simply a mistake so as we move into looking at modern Network management and using network automation uh we submit the order and we go through all of those same steps but we do it through automation so now we can guarantee consistency uh we’re not going to miss something

uh we can have uh changes and requests that are pre-approved so we don’t necessarily have to go to our risk management or our infosec uh review boards every single time for every single change uh and we know that it will be done the change will be done in a compliant fashion uh we know that we are going to adhere to all of our standards we’re never going to deviate from them because the code won’t allow that um we will then perform the implementation through code um

and do automated testing again one of the great benefits we know that the testing is going to be done consistently the same way every time uh and as we move through that that process because we’re testing through automation there may be occasionally be an edge case that pops up that oh we didn’t have a test built for that this is one of the major events of automation is we can now go build a test for that edge case and that problem will never happen again which is not something

we can say in the existing world right when we have a problem that occurs uh and humans are running it we make a note of it we update some documentation perhaps a Confluence doc or a SharePoint file uh and we expect that everyone’s going to take note of that we update the wiki whatever it is but inevitably two weeks later that same problem’s going to occur and someone that will not have read that documentation will not be aware of it and we will have the same problem over again

uh this is just inevitably what happens as we manage our networks by hand whereas when we move to automated world that doesn’t occur right we document it once we fix it once and then that problem is now solved from now on and forward major advantage there uh timec consuming repeatable tasks cost organizations millions of dollars annually another great quote that we have from some of our industry experts right so this is where we’re looking at how can we save time

uh and effort improving our delivery uh and consistency by using network automation here’s just an example no you’re now going from Days down into minutes of delivery of a request through uh automation of this workflow datadriven decision making how do we enhance our analytics and methods of consumption so this is the idea that hey you know we have our networks out there they are becoming more complex uh we have lots of sources of Truth in the mix we have our observability platform form running in there

and it is producing probably large amounts of data so how can we uh assist the operations the engineers that are are trying to keep and maintain good uptime in our networks and make this more reliable so first is the notion of bringing an observability platform and linking it into our Network source of Truth uh and network source of Truth integrated with the observability platform has two major advantages uh on the data consumption side right we’re able to centralize our storage visualization

and alerting uh into a one place so now we understand the status of a device uh and where it lives where it’s connected how it interacts with the world and all of the components that it’s consuming in our world as opposed to having these in separate places in our traditional world we have our cmdb we have our DCI we have our ipam we have our monitoring tool we have our itsm we have our controllers we have C you know as an example here specific of how we might be running an SDM

this idea is hey let’s centralize that let’s get all that information into one place so now we can do things like having Advanced dashboards that consolidate this data and combine it into one location where we can visualize it from uh so you know for example uh we could automatically pull information from logs uh that we might be receiving from the Telemetry platform uh and and correlate that to metrics that we’re receiving from our our uh metrics collection methodologies

and then if we’re now storing that in a Time series database we can start to visualize those Trends we can understand what happened we can go back in time we can predict what will happen as we move into the future uh we can see what happens at the holiday season for us maybe we’re a retail business uh we can have accurate prediction of where we’re headed as we are able to both document what occurred and visualize what could happen uh then data collection and manipulation by giving a central place

uh to access information we can speed up our development uh so that’s achieved through rest API or graphql endpoints that the network source of Truth can tie into the rest of the organization and the development in the code that’s written external to those platforms so now we don’t have to have uh developers that are accessing five or six or seven different apis or different tools they’re able to access just a single API via the network source of Truth get a Consolidated view

of the data that’s happening on the network and then manipulate that or use it in whatever code they’re writing so let’s take a look now at the true cost of downtime and security breaches I think this is something that’s really easy to overlook uh in the moment when this happens we struggle with it we uh tell ourselves we’re going to take steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again but inevitably we end up kind of kicking it down the road right we kind of ignore those hidden liabilities those risks

and those inefficiencies but there is real cost that happens uh with these types of outages and security breaches so let’s take a look at that and kind of begin to examine what that means uh so the true cost of an outage uh when we think of it just normally we probably think in these terms of like there’s some Revenue per hour that the business is generating times the duration of the outage times the impact of the percentage of the overall businesses the total cost

of the outage right that’s what we would say is is probably our understood cost but there are hidden costs that we’re ignoring when we think of that so for example there’s remediation costs uh we are probably very often having to go to bring in outside Personnel third party contractors uh maybe third party hands uh we may have to replace or end up replacing equipment because of an inaccurate diagnosis um how many times has this happened where we RMA some Hardware because

we think it f failed and that actually wasn’t the problem uh engineering hours both internal and managed service providers that are having to be spent on remediating an issue conducting the RCA in the postmortem uh if we’re properly following up on an outage uh we’re going to end up spending a lot of time on this and this is often overlooked uh what ends up happening is it means that we take time away from a project that we were working on or a new deliverable that

we were trying to get out the door uh and we have to postpone that uh due to working on this RCA or the postm and understanding what happened these these uh types of events especially in large or significant outages can be very impactful uh involving multiple teams within the organization to get to the root cause and understand what happened there’s just that opportunity cost of that hey we had to pull Key Personnel usually when this happens we pull in

all the senior level people so all those folks that were supposed to be working on other things on projects driving the business forward or the tech team forward uh they’re now suddenly pulling pulled into this other task and now we’re just all hands on deck trying to understand what happened customer defections and reimbursements uh sometimes we lose customers uh as a result of these types of incidents uh Andor we end up having to give back to our customers as a way to appease them

so that they don’t leave us uh these are both very expensive uh we don’t want to have customer turn and obviously having to give reimbursements is painful for everybody uh it’s difficult to implement it it doesn’t really ever satisfy by the client they will always remember it they will always bring this back to Hato uh anytime there’s a problem in the future they will always reference what happened last year the year before potentially depending on the type of outage there may actually even be civil penalties

and fines uh you know depending on the impact that we have and and why it occurred if we were negligent in some way um there may actually be some significant cost benef uh ramification to this type of event and then finally reputational loss um not only from our customers getting upset with us but also internally um these types of events are very demoralizing for our team uh it hurts our impression to our our Word of Mouth business uh investors may hear of this and become concerned

and it may be more difficult to negotiate as a business uh so these are things we really need to consider as we think of it’s not just about the revenue per hour lost there is much more to this story as we think about how we deal with the ramifications of an incident and then if we look at a security breach uh this is you know even going Beyond those direct costs you know we have uh you know again the the currently understood what we might think of

uh incident response and Recovery uh investigative activities um might have to uh bring in outside vendors again you know audit Services now that are required to come and and check on us or crisis management that we’re commonly using to deal with the security breach but there are additional costs as well um disrupted business operations uh quite often we will end up having to shut down some form portion of the network or even all of the network while we deal with the problem

uh hardware and software recovery uh sometimes it may be damaged directly or indirectly uh then we may have to remediate those to recover the technology to the pre breach for example uh maybe we have to pull in backups for example depending on the type of breach uh customer credit and identity monitoring uh if the data if the breach uh involves sensitive financial data such as credit cards or other pii uh businesses will often opt to offer free credit or identity monitoring Services you know in additional cost that

we may have to incur again civil fines uh lawsuits penalties are all possible and then of course just Ransom demands right this is happening as we’re seeing uh in 2023 there was an estimate that over $1 billion in uh R and pay payments were made globally so a significant amount of money can be end up going out just in order to avoid the problem right to just pay the ransom and and move on although that still has a cost uh meak intellectual property can harm us from the

uh giving our competitors a significant advantage and then of course the reputational damage this is very difficult to recover from and is almost immeasurable uh when we think about what that reput reputational damage can do to a company uh just one here from IBM security that the average cost of a data breach for a US company in 2023 was $9.48 Million significant impact uh to the business then so those are some of the challenges we see uh and as we realize those are real costs

now what can we do to begin to address this so as we move into a world where we want to have intent-based networking where we want to be able to provide reliable scalable consistent networks that are not vulnerable um what can we do so Nautobot is that is that bridge it’s how we get from where we are today to where we want to go it is the foundation to successful Enterprise Network automation so here as we take a look at this screen we have a full view of a flow of how Nautobot can be utilized to provision conf

and configure deployments into our Network n ofon is able to fully provision networks with little to no no human intervention and that’s really a key element to understand about what the Nautobot platform enables because Nautobot is a network source of Truth and it is also an automation platform it therefore allows our Network Architects to Define reusable models of what the network looks like uh Network operators can consume those models and those parameters in a friendly human readable way

um Nautobot then takes the network its intent the data being provided by the operator merges that into now the changes required on the network and deploys them out uh so we can actually go through this entire flow using the Nautobot framework as we leverage all of the components within that Nautobot infrastructure finally we’re then going to do quality insurance and testing so when we push a change into the environment we’re going to make sure that it’s tested properly both before

and after so we know that the network is performing as expected and then autogenerating reports that can update into whether it’s the ticket system notifying the requestor or simply there for documentation purposes as we move forward in our world so being able to leverage a single platform that has a lot of flexibility to design and Implement your business process and therefore bring Network change into your environment using intent-based networking this is what Nautobot is

all about Nautobot allows us to have repeatable scalable methods uh so transitioning to new technologies uh and simplifying scaling so here for example uh perhaps uh we’re doing a a network refresh and we’re going to transition to some new models from the same vendor but inevitably there’s always going to be some changes as we do that um because we have described our intent in a vendor neutral fashion uh and a model neutr fashion evening for that matter we’re

now able to make those changes uh in the intent state and then allow the leveraging of the NWA platform to then push out those updates into the new equipment so we’re basically translating from one model to another with very little human intervention this also allows us to transition to new technologies because we have that intent already described in uh abstraction from the platform so now we understand how the network is supposed to communicate

so whether we’re using sdw or some other form of w technology it doesn’t really matter uh we’re simply implementing this new method into the existing platform uh the same as the idea whether maybe we’re not just going from model to model but we’re actually going from vendor a to vendor B in this example we said Juniper to Arista it could just as easily be Arista to Cisco or what have you uh as we are able to move into a multivendor strategy uh we

now can leverage this intent to make these transitions more possible uh this allows us to be uh more efficient to potentially have a multivendor strategy and to make sure that we can leverage our intent up against whatever infrastructure we have or whatever the request is from the technical team at the moment uh we can do things like cloning uh allowing us to scale more rapidly whether it’s a specific device like a switch or a router um an entire Rack or even an entire location

uh because we have these designs expressed in a vendor neutral and Abstract format into the source of Truth we now can rapid spin them up and deploy them uh so no longer is it a very large difficult task to get configuration from one site to another site or one rack to another Rack or even just device to device we can automate that process and actually Express what those configuration should look like very rapidly version controlly this is something really interesting

as we see this trend towards intent-based networking and net devops uh Nautobot enables us to leverage get and in fact it was built from the ground up to implement and integrate with get and get workf flows this means that Nautobot is natively capable of enabling our cicd pipelines uh it will integrate with whatever pipeline you’re using very flexible here uh we are now having full traceability across our workflows we understand who did what and when because we’re using automation to deploy

and track those changes our approval processes are consistent and repeatable and make sense they’re documented in the flow we understand them and we can also do things like automated roll backs if needed or roll backs on demand uh very easy to get back to our original state um these are all the advantages that we see using git in general and then when we leverage them and bring them into our Network automation space they really start to compound those value ads

uh here’s some just some simple use cases where we see uh our clients and our community members using Nautobot and get device configurations uh templating automation scripts and and just export templates uh really being able to Leverage The Power of G and GitHub into a Nautobot workflow Nautobot integrates with the platforms you already use you probably heard me allude to this before for example it doesn’t matter what orchestration platform you’re using or what vendor you’re using on your Hardware you can keep the architecture you already have while you build out that architecture that you want

uh this is a key element of the idea of Nautobot is that it should be extensible and flexible uh regardless of whether the data that you need to operate your world is is in the cloud or traditional Network or it management platform Nautobot has the ability to interact with them uh and again whether it’s uh a vendor uh or a tool or some other form of data storage Nautobot is intended to be really flexible this way um that is why we built the platform that is why the Nautobot framework exists

and you see that automation layer there that creating that capability to interact with the world around us Nautobot is designed to implement your world and your business process we don’t expect you to adapt to the tool the tool adapts to you a little bit about Nautobot Cloud now we talked about this idea of moving into cloud-based controllers and the advantages we see there we see this happening with a lot of the major vendors as well um whether we’re talking about Arista Cloud Vision

uh or moroi from Cisco uh we have these examples of very cloud-based driven tools um and they bring so much value added to the business in that we no longer have to worry about operating the tool well the same is true of Nautobot now rather than having to deploy this on Prem and uh worry about running that infrastructure having uh a team that’s capable of managing that underlying infrastructure instead it’s all available for you operated by Network to code in the NAC

uh this means that we can uh take advantage of all of those benefits of the automation Marketplace uh the enhanced data analytics uh those apis that allow us to create those work workflows those net devops pipelines and workflows U without having to worry about any of that underlying infrastructure so all of the benefits of Nautobot with none of the headache it is self-service um and allows us to scale out uh so we have not only the cord Nautobot functionality available which is exactly the same

as you might see in the open source project but also layered on top additional value ads so for example better insights into your data and your workflows the advantage of those dashboards that provide that data inal Linux for you so some great advantages coming there in Nautobot cloud and then the key component of Nautobot and what really differentiates Nautobot as a source of Truth is its automation platform we’ve alluded to this throughout the talk today U

here’s an example of some of our very uh robust available applications we have out there uh some of the most popular are golden configuration app uh this app allowing you to Define what your network standards are so express your intent and then compare that to what’s actually out there in the real world to understand those differences uh device life cycle management another really popular one uh understanding the hardware software and security aspects of your devices

um being able to manage those report on those understand like hey this cve just came out does that impact us and get quickly get a report understand that um potentially then rolling right into uh it does impact us and in fact we need to get out an upgrade into our firmware so great rolling right into the OS upgrades application also available as part of the Nautobot platform abling enabling us to quickly deploy updated operating systems into our environment

so as we look at Network to Code as a business not just the uh Nautobot project but how are we positioned to help uh ensuring that you have a holistic approach to network automation kind of just this quick thought about like the importance of expert guidance uh if we’re trying to get to the goal of lowering our operating costs uh enhanced stability business agility improving our security better insight and control U of course you know potentially you could challenge your teams or task your teams with going out

and taking this on uh but inevitably that is not going to be a straight path uh there are going to be things in the way uh there might be bears in the way there might be vacations and mountain time in the way uh there’s going to be dragons of course uh there are all of these things that pop up along the way that make it difficult for us to get to the goal we end up chasing different paths realizing oh that path is not going to take us to success and this is the value

of partnering with a company like Network to code where we have been down these paths before we understand what these challenges are and we can help you avoid them we can get you directly to the goal as quickly as possible showing Roi back to your immediate business within the technology teams but and as well as to the overall team as well to the overall business as well so why NTC uh that realizing that those outstanding results come from expertly AFF formed informed approach

we have the experience our team at entc consists of we believe the most extensive group of network automation experts that exists we have implemented these types of solutions for hundreds of our Enterprise clients and that has led us to build a comprehensive approach we understand that adopting automation is not just a technical challenge um our holistic approach is going to to focus on all the components that is how do we get everyone on board with this notion

uh of moving from how they do work today how they will do work in the future how do we understand the business the business process and make sure that we’re implementing our business process specifically within the technology stack uh so that we in we integrate these three things seamlessly and painlessly and if you’re listening closely I just said people processing technology with without actually saying it because everyone likes to say it but very few actually deliver on it

and this is what we built our business around is this idea that we need to do that because the technology is amazing and in fact it’s the easiest part of the problem to solve the process the business and the people those are the hardest two parts and if we don’t do those parts the technology piece really doesn’t matter and so that is a key element to our business that is our comprehensive approach we are taking on all of those components and then speed

uh our team is acts as a force multiplier we have the specialized skill sets across our deep bench of Engineers and developers that can understand your challenges whether they’re technical people or process and make sure we get those solve as quickly as possible these are the value ads Network to Code brings to the table and why it is more efficient and probably saves you money uh versus doing it yourself here’s some example comes that we have seen with our clients these are specific use cases that

we have helped with um I alluded to it earlier on the previous slide about the operating system upgrades how can we automate that uh this is a specific example for one of our clients uh they had about uh 10,000 devices in their environment and before the project they were spending around 7,000 hours of effort in order to upgrade their environments when they did that now of course because that’s so much time they weren’t doing it very often this led to some security issues

uh where they were vulnerable abilities in their Network due to lack of patching uh through automation we’re able to get that down to 600 hours significant Savings in time and effort going into doing those upgrades and notice we didn’t give you some ridiculous promise that they went from 7,000 hours to 2 minutes we’re trying to be realistic here we want to really show you real world Solutions with real world experience uh we’re not going to promise you the world and not deliver on it

this is really about reality keep it compliance uh another perfect example we do this in almost every every single one of our engagements that we work with on our clients this is usually part of the base Foundation that is we need a source of Truth we need to get it populated with data and we need to get the network consistent and reliable in compliance with our standards uh this leads us to less frequent outages uh shorter outages when they do occur we can troubleshoot more easily

and we have a better security posture by quickly and easily understanding how the network is configured versus how it should be configured and then making sure we can remediate that and fix that all right some great resources out there for you if you want to learn more about Network to code or Nautobot uh we have ebooks and white papers available that can be uh leveraged from our website uh we have a whole webinar series and videos uh this you’re on the second one of our automation Excellence webinar

we do have others as well and of course we have several books out there our most recent is the network automation with Nautobot this is a very technical book for your developers and Engineering teams uh but others have available as well for those that may be just beginning uh so we have an extensive catalog of reference material available for uh both you and your team members to be able to learn from and grow from all right so that concludes our prepared section of the slides

and we’re moving into our Q&A section so if you have any questions please do feel free to put them into the Q&A there and it looks like we did get one coming in here very quickly thank you for that uh so I’m looking to streamline our Network automation workflows can Nautobot integrate with service now self-service portals for easier user provisioning absolutely uh we have seen this trend that many organizations are using service now and the service

now cmdb uh and want to implement their workflows as that as the instantiation point yes um in fact most of our clients that we do Integrations with we almost always integrate with service now in some form or other whether it’s for a workflow or the service now seem to be so absolutely we’re there for you on the front and by the way that’s not a limitation if you’re using some other itsm no problem uh but by far in way the one we most commonly see right

now is definitely service now uh let’s see uh looks like we got another one coming in wow you all are firing them away at me thank you uh we’re considering a cloud-based deployment for Nautobot are there any major drawbacks compared to on Prem uh and then there’s also follow-up so let’s do with the first one first uh are there any major drawbacks compared to on Prem setup uh I would say no to be honest uh with one exception uh the only requirement from the Nautobot Cloud perspective is that

we are going to have to create connectivity between the cloud infrastructure and your internal infrastructure as a way for Nautobot to reach out and touch devices um typically we do that via some form of tunnel but it can also be done via Direct Connect method on the back end so depending on how you can use and consume public Cloud that may actually be very easy that’s probably the only disadvantage I would see over on-prem deployment is that idea

now perhaps you’re in a world where you say that’s not possible no problem we got your back uh we can deploy an on Prem proxy that would be able to reach out and touch devices within your world and then it’s going to reach back out in phone home providing that information back to Nautobot Cloud so there is a way around that if you’re in a world where we cannot build a tunnel uh between Nautobot cloud and your on-prem infrastructure uh which Cloud platform does Nautobot used

for cloud deployments uh so we are flexible on on this uh as far as the way we operate our infrastructure uh we do try to keep that as uh amenable to the world as well as making sure that we’re able to accommodate no matter where you are so if you are outside of the US and in some other part of the world we can accommodate your data compliance requirements let’s see some other questions coming in here let’s see does Nautobot do device configuration backup

absolutely uh so this is one of the optional components of our golden config app is the capability to do new uh device configuration backups in fact that’s how we understand the actual state of the device whether you want to leverage the whole application or not uh you can use Nautobot to do those backups so absolutely uh the great thing about that is Nautobot is going to store those backups in get uh so you have them fully Version Control that full history there available

for you as well as easy to consume them in the Nautobot about UI and understand and look at your backups let’s see uh is there a more specific architecture drawing of a standard on Prem or Cloud Nautobot deployment that that gives a little more detail other than the standard marketing materials understood absolutely yes please do reach out to us uh we’d love to get you that reference architecture and show you what that looks like uh you can reach out through some links that we’ll show you here at the end

of the webinar we’ll get you that information no problem uh would the Nautobot source of Truth this is coming in from Daniel kot uh would the Nautobot source of Truth cmdb data and device inventories be synchronized with service now in real time uh so how does that synchronization occur I think is what you’re asking as far as as we move data back and forth between Nautobot and the N uh service now SE to be or or for that matter any other source of Truth external to Nautobot

uh so how that synchronization occurs is very flexible uh it can occur ad hoc that as you click the button and it happens uh it can occur in a regular schedule you say I want it to happen once every hour or you can have it happen triggered by a web hook so let’s say there’s an event that occurs uh there’s an update into the service now seem to be and we want to do that synchronization immediately so you have that full control of that flexibility how that could occur

so it absolutely can occur in real time uh by real time let’s say within a few seconds uh because obviously there may not be uh immediate um but as near to real time as is reasonably feasible so yes absolutely possible all right uh any other questions I’ll give you another minute or so looks like we may have one last one coming in here just now uh I’m evaluating Nautobot alongside other network automation tools like netbox and Ansible how do they conm in terms of functionality in use cases

so I’m going to address the Ansible one first because that’s kind of interesting uh so traditionally we think of ansible there are two major components of the Ansible project there’s the Ansible the idea of like I have a Playbook that I run on my laptop and it executes some tasks that’s the automation piece of Ansible uh then there’s Ansible automation platform or formly known as Ansible Tower that’s the orchestration component of of an that’s where I say I want to do a whole series

of tasks and I’d like to check out the results of those now in the first case of Ansible automation that is a Playbook Nautobot as tightly integrated with Ansible in fact it was built on top of a lot of those ideas so we’re actually able to consume Ansible and use it directly within the platform of Nautobot then on the orchestration side the external component to Nautobot that Nautobot is absolutely designed to integrate with and consume or utilize Ansible automation platform Ansible Tower Ansible awx which is the open source version

of those so absolutely tightly integrated with and intended to inform those States the benefit we get is now I no longer need to worry about things like my Ansible inventory my device bars my group fars all of that is maintained by Nautobot uh so we have that major advantage there as far as how we can integrate and use those tools eliminating a lot of the ansible overhead the pain of using Ansible now we get all the value of it without having to deal with the hard parts

of it uh as compared to netbox uh Nautobot was really built to be extensible and flexible uh and one of the key differences is the idea that we have our Network source of Truth layered in with our automation platform the idea that data in and of itself is not that valuable the value comes for when we use the data to actually drive the change and drive our Network and that’s what Nautobot is built to do Nautobot is built to give us a way to actually operate our environment from data

so we change data and then things happen the major benefit to this is that we’re no longer thinking of data as documentation but instead we’re thinking of data as the way we actually drive and operate our network uh this is very much a paradigm shift for our Engineers um and it is really the key distinction between operating in a traditional CLI driven World versus operating in an intent-based or net devops driven World okay uh oh we did just get one more in here while I was answering that question

uh is Nautobot perpetually licensed subscription based or not licensed at all uh so it is licensed under the Apachi 2 uh so it is free and open source everything you see in the project is free and open source uh if you would like to consume our Nautobot Cloud option which is the same code uh enhanced uh but available to you that is available via subscription all right that’s the Easy Button don’t need to worry about deploying it on prep but as far as the Nautobot code itself it is licensed under Apache to

okay I think that is all of our questions for the day uh let’s move on here as we come into the conclusion of the webinar uh some other great things now we talked a little bit about the people uh if we’re serious about this we really need to level up our teams in addition to the technology and the business process and we’re here for you at that as well we have uh instructor-led training so that is your team members come into either one of our public or one of our private classes

uh they’re able to spend about half of their day with the trainer and half of their day doing Labs kind of in a back and forth method so you know roughly some time with training some time with lab practice so they’re really beginning to understand and consume the things that they’re learning and actually put them into practice throughout their training class following that up with that online training this is great for after their live training class

now they’re able to have materials reference documentation and really begin to continue this journey as they move back into regular life and now actually taking advantage of those things they learned uh as you look across that trajectory there you can see we have all the way from just the beginning hey I’m brand new to network automation I don’t know anything about Network automation all the way up to I’m very Advanced I’m a developer but I really need to understand more details about Telemetry monitoring or Nautobot itself

uh how do I actually manage configuration with python so all of these very Advanced topics available as well so we’re here to take your team and your people from where they are now all the way to where they need to go so as we look at the topics we covered today uh we learned how intent-based networking and NAA delivers outstanding outcomes that make your organization more productive and reduces operational risk along we covered some real world examples and practical examples

of intent-based networking and action we went through this idea of what does it mean as far as future proofing what is the real true cost of downtime insecurity breaches and then finally looking at how Nautobot and network to code our position to help thanks very much for attending uh here are some links to all things Nautobot and a QR code there available for your if you are interested in a demo or having a session with some of our sales team members thank you very much and look forward to seeing you on the next webinar