The divide between operations teams in the networking space in recent years has not gone unnoticed. Server, network, cloud, application… Regardless of the team you belong to, you’ve surely also noticed the difficulties that sometimes arise when working with other teams. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Cross-departmental skill gaps? Data quality and authority issues that prevent teams from experiencing the same “shared reality”, resulting in siloed teams? Whatever the reason, the ability to maintain observability and foster communication across internal silos is critical for promoting successful collaboration.
There is a solution out there already that can help to close these gaps – Automated Network Assurance.
Automated Network Assurance consists of five key elements that come together to provide a holistic understanding of a network's state. Fore a more detailed insight into the core tenets of assurance, check out this piece here.
Making sure that these five elements are readily available can close the gap between teams and foster effective collaboration. Let's explore how.
Let's take a look at how assurance can remove siloes through the lens of two trends in the networking sphere, those being NetSecOps and Cloud adoption:
In an EMA report on the recent convergence of NetSecOps (a subset of NetOps that integrates automated network security testing in DevOps), 24% of surveyed companies believed skill gaps between cross-domain teams constituted a collaboration roadblock. Further compounding this issue is the fact that operations teams are often dispersed across several geographical locations. This is a pain point for many organizations adopting the NetSecOps approach, as the collaboration between app development, network security and IT operations teams is essential.
Effective cross-team collaboration is more relevant than ever thanks to the increased adoption of cloud solutions amongst enterprises. Whilst these strategies typically falter as networking teams are not involved in the planning phase of cloud adoption, there are other reasons for this, including:
With Network Assurance providing an accurate single point of reference for network information for all teams to access, detailed insights into the five pillars of assurance can be shared to ensure that collaboration becomes more effective, regardless of skill level, existing knowledge, or the physical location of the relevant teams.
For cloud strategies in particular, leveraging assurance data to understand their construction and how they interconnect with on-premises networks can is invaluable for enhanced collaboration. This visibility and understanding provides cloud and network teams with a centralized depository of vital network information to work from. (IP Fabric in particular is able to discover private cloud networks, including AWS VPCs and Azure Vnets - letting teams create end-to-end path simulations across the hybrid cloud and create consolidated hybrid network topology maps).
Ensuring that network information is readily available and current through assurance also has some practical advantages. Chief among these is the ability to leverage current network information to improve some key metrics - Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Innocence (MTTI).
Issue discovery and resolution are more efficient when teams are reading from the same hymn sheet (or network topology diagrams) after all. With ready access to necessary state information, and detailed insights into the relationship between affected network components on various layers, teams can avoid playing the ping-pong-esque blame game that often occurs to determine root cause quickly, efficiently, and amicably.
Leveraging network assurance not only expedites the discovery of potential problems, but also their resolution. As an example, let's assume there's a security incident. Typically, security teams depend on network infrastructure teams to provide network information.
This doesn't seem to be a tenable position when those responsible for hardening the network against attack doesn't have the full picture (or immediate access to said picture) of the attack surface they're responsible for. Without quick access to this information, the drive to resolve the issue may stagnate, resulting in damages caused by service downtime, and therefore, sunk cost.
Automated network assurance can remedy this. Security teams can leverage assurance data to obtain information on hardware and software inventories, configurations (including firewall configs), or any other information they need to continuously validate policies and configs at scale across network environments. All of this, without relying on the infrastructure team to provide.
How can teams quickly access the data they need, you might ask? Well with IP Fabric of course!
The IP Fabric Automated Network Assurance Platform allows teams to access network data like hardware and firewall configurations quickly through data democratization.
Leveraging simple REST API calls, teams can gather contextualized insights about the network, without the need to parse or model the data themselves. This means that members of other teams are able to access the necessary information whenever they need to.
IP Fabric enhances this even further through its integration with Nautobot-ChatOps. This integration allows teams to access essential networking information through chat functions (e.g., MS Teams, Webex, and Slack) by making simple queries in their chat window, such as "/ipfabric get-snapshot".
Network Assurance is a natural solution to ensuring that teams can effectively collaborate, regardless of location or existing knowledge. Whether reporting and troubleshooting issues, validating network vulnerabilities, or simply obtaining the whereabouts of a component within the network, teams can empower themselves with the knowledge they need.
We posit that network assurance should become an ever-present cornerstone of network and automation strategies to ensure teams can bridge the gaps between them, and as a result, become more resilient to change and network issues alike.
Want to see automated network assurance in action for yourself? Try out our free, self-guided demo to see if network assurance can help you to bring your teams closer together. Prefer the personal touch? Schedule an obligation-free demo with a member of our dedicated team here.
Feel free to follow us on LinkedIn, and on our blog, where we regularly publish new content.
The divide between operations teams in the networking space in recent years has not gone unnoticed. Server, network, cloud, application… Regardless of the team you belong to, you’ve surely also noticed the difficulties that sometimes arise when working with other teams. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Cross-departmental skill gaps? Data quality and authority issues that prevent teams from experiencing the same “shared reality”, resulting in siloed teams? Whatever the reason, the ability to maintain observability and foster communication across internal silos is critical for promoting successful collaboration.
There is a solution out there already that can help to close these gaps – Automated Network Assurance.
Automated Network Assurance consists of five key elements that come together to provide a holistic understanding of a network's state. Fore a more detailed insight into the core tenets of assurance, check out this piece here.
Making sure that these five elements are readily available can close the gap between teams and foster effective collaboration. Let's explore how.
Let's take a look at how assurance can remove siloes through the lens of two trends in the networking sphere, those being NetSecOps and Cloud adoption:
In an EMA report on the recent convergence of NetSecOps (a subset of NetOps that integrates automated network security testing in DevOps), 24% of surveyed companies believed skill gaps between cross-domain teams constituted a collaboration roadblock. Further compounding this issue is the fact that operations teams are often dispersed across several geographical locations. This is a pain point for many organizations adopting the NetSecOps approach, as the collaboration between app development, network security and IT operations teams is essential.
Effective cross-team collaboration is more relevant than ever thanks to the increased adoption of cloud solutions amongst enterprises. Whilst these strategies typically falter as networking teams are not involved in the planning phase of cloud adoption, there are other reasons for this, including:
With Network Assurance providing an accurate single point of reference for network information for all teams to access, detailed insights into the five pillars of assurance can be shared to ensure that collaboration becomes more effective, regardless of skill level, existing knowledge, or the physical location of the relevant teams.
For cloud strategies in particular, leveraging assurance data to understand their construction and how they interconnect with on-premises networks can is invaluable for enhanced collaboration. This visibility and understanding provides cloud and network teams with a centralized depository of vital network information to work from. (IP Fabric in particular is able to discover private cloud networks, including AWS VPCs and Azure Vnets - letting teams create end-to-end path simulations across the hybrid cloud and create consolidated hybrid network topology maps).
Ensuring that network information is readily available and current through assurance also has some practical advantages. Chief among these is the ability to leverage current network information to improve some key metrics - Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Innocence (MTTI).
Issue discovery and resolution are more efficient when teams are reading from the same hymn sheet (or network topology diagrams) after all. With ready access to necessary state information, and detailed insights into the relationship between affected network components on various layers, teams can avoid playing the ping-pong-esque blame game that often occurs to determine root cause quickly, efficiently, and amicably.
Leveraging network assurance not only expedites the discovery of potential problems, but also their resolution. As an example, let's assume there's a security incident. Typically, security teams depend on network infrastructure teams to provide network information.
This doesn't seem to be a tenable position when those responsible for hardening the network against attack doesn't have the full picture (or immediate access to said picture) of the attack surface they're responsible for. Without quick access to this information, the drive to resolve the issue may stagnate, resulting in damages caused by service downtime, and therefore, sunk cost.
Automated network assurance can remedy this. Security teams can leverage assurance data to obtain information on hardware and software inventories, configurations (including firewall configs), or any other information they need to continuously validate policies and configs at scale across network environments. All of this, without relying on the infrastructure team to provide.
How can teams quickly access the data they need, you might ask? Well with IP Fabric of course!
The IP Fabric Automated Network Assurance Platform allows teams to access network data like hardware and firewall configurations quickly through data democratization.
Leveraging simple REST API calls, teams can gather contextualized insights about the network, without the need to parse or model the data themselves. This means that members of other teams are able to access the necessary information whenever they need to.
IP Fabric enhances this even further through its integration with Nautobot-ChatOps. This integration allows teams to access essential networking information through chat functions (e.g., MS Teams, Webex, and Slack) by making simple queries in their chat window, such as "/ipfabric get-snapshot".
Network Assurance is a natural solution to ensuring that teams can effectively collaborate, regardless of location or existing knowledge. Whether reporting and troubleshooting issues, validating network vulnerabilities, or simply obtaining the whereabouts of a component within the network, teams can empower themselves with the knowledge they need.
We posit that network assurance should become an ever-present cornerstone of network and automation strategies to ensure teams can bridge the gaps between them, and as a result, become more resilient to change and network issues alike.
Want to see automated network assurance in action for yourself? Try out our free, self-guided demo to see if network assurance can help you to bring your teams closer together. Prefer the personal touch? Schedule an obligation-free demo with a member of our dedicated team here.
Feel free to follow us on LinkedIn, and on our blog, where we regularly publish new content.
