So those that have joined, thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. What we're going to go through here is a bit of a glimpse into IP Fabric, particularly the challenges, within health care network management environments. We've taken some fairly specific use cases that have been validated by some of our customers in customers in, the National Health Service in the UK, but also within private health care and other university hospitals elsewhere in Europe. So the use cases are more specific to health care, but the network assurance technology in its own right, is is more general and, does fit across the verticals. So anyone joining from outside of the health care space, you'll still see relevance in this.

The the format that we're going to take here is we'll go through a few slides to give you the context and a bit of an overview of the key challenges. We'll then give you an overview of IP Fabric, positioning and also its capability before diving into a very brief product demonstration. We'll hope to keep this in under 40 minutes, even shorter if we can just to keep it fresh and and keep it interesting for you. But the idea is we'll open up for a bit of q and a at the end, but then get in touch with us afterwards once we share the recording of the webinar, and we'll schedule some, some breakout sessions to really go into detail of what the technology is capable of, how it's applicable to health care and the specific challenges we cover, but also how it's relevant outside of that as well. So just as quick introductions, my name is Joe Kershaw.

I'm the channel development lead. So my focus is a commercial role working in the leadership of our global partnership, program. So I work with our community of partners, specialists, and ambassadors to really bring what what is a a very powerful tool and capability in the practice of network assurance down into practical delivery and make sure we're really realizing benefit from the technology for our customers in health care and and across the other verticals as well. Also got Darren Fulwell with me who will be guiding you through the demonstration and further detail with a wealth of experience, certifications under his belt, and involvement in certification advisory board from Cisco. Darren's part of the IP Fabric team as a product automation evangelist, and we'll be leading you through some of the technical aspects today, but we'll be happy to get involved in the sessions further down the line if you want to know more.

So network assurance as a a practice is similar to that of quality assurance in manufacturing, similar to the whole process of assurance. So the idea of using automation to draw out risk, to remove errors which would be difficult to spot manually, and to improve processes, both in efficiency terms and also in terms of their security and compliance. We've seen, adoption of our platform and network assurance across multiple verticals, but we see the most well suited verticals being those with which the technology services are delivering, critical services. So where the technology underlying the business services is critical and service outage just cannot be entertained, And where service outage may occur, we need to respond much faster. These type of verticals, so financial services, manufacturing, health care are the perfect fit for a network assurance platform and approach.

We touch also here on the challenges, high level challenges of resource strain. So this may be industries where personnel resources or financial budgeting resources are somewhat restricted. There's never an ever flowing, river of cash to to kind of deal with all of the challenges you're facing. So you're under pressure by management to do more with less. And despite the fact that the demands on the teams and the technology keep increasing, the expectations around innovation and delivering greater services keep on increasing, the resource pool, both financial and people wise, is not increasing.

So we see customers look to adopt automation and and particularly network assurance in these places to help make their daily tasks less manual, less burdensome, and much more effective to be able to do more with the existing pool of resources that they have. The aspect of complexity we'll touch on quite a lot in the following slides, but this is around complexity in legacy environments, in multi vendor environments, complexity in adoption of new technologies, and the skills associated, to to make successful execution on these technologies, this is all overlapping and intermingling to mean that infrastructure strategy interrogate, and report on in order to streamline interrogate, and report on in order to streamline processes again and help to reduce risk, which again back to the crux of the, network assurance capability. The next slide goes into the 4 top level technical challenges or at least infrastructure challenges that we've validated with our health care clients across Europe and the US. And speaking with these customers, we've we've mentioned where we believe the technology fits and had them also validate their view. The top top line, challenge that we see within the National Health Service infrastructure team specifically, but also within wider, education and sorry.

Education, but health care environments and the university and education environments, for the health care is across some of the the European cities as well is that of technical debt. So all of the aspects of, infrastructure past, so around maybe lack of trust leading to shadow IT, developments of different technologies to underpin particular service areas of hospitals or health care environments, complex overlaying technologies, maybe a a cyclical budget in the past. The, the the tender was won by a different vendor. So you have vendor mixes, you have underlying technologies that are mixing, and a demand to rationalize legacy estate, migrate some. Maybe that's in transition.

Maybe it's completely finished. But there's always demand of different technologies and complexity, which you're carrying forward whilst the management still demands greater innovation, greater service delivery, almost like running with a parachute on. Technical debt is the crucial challenge that we look to help address here. The idea of service continuity in health care is, is obviously a a very pivotal demand being that if a service is going to face resiliency issues, if there are points where technical services are not going to be available, these things happen. You know?

No one's perfect. These processes have been built by humans, maybe some people that have moved on. So it's gonna happen that service outages do occur, but the ability to respond on a rapid speed and make sure that answers are available, data is available to teams, and multidisciplinary teams can come to these, these conclusions and answers quickly and look for the fastest solution to implement. The third focus of our, presentation and demonstration today is gonna be around compliance. So compliance means many things to different organizations within the health care space, particularly.

There may be HIPAA or FHIA or particularly regulatory compliance frameworks, such as the DSP toolkit expectations, which may be mandated government. They may be mandated by regional management, but it's a case that it needs to be kept on top of. There is then security posture, security compliance, and also the ability to report on this information at any given time and track the, adherence to security expectations and wider regulatory compliance over time. We've taken an example here of the DSP toolkit for the NHS in the UK, which is a a ream of many points and statements that should underpin an operational stance with regard to infrastructure. So this should include things like minimum all devices being in vendor support or all changes being tracked and properly measured with configurations being secure.

In the in isolation, these comments may fit where it may seem fairly restricted, fairly simple, and quite easy to, understand how you would respond to them. But once you start coming into these, major city hospital environments of multiple core hospitals with hundreds of devices and there are a chance of these questions being raised at any point, The idea of answering the question of of broad sweeping compliance and regulatory expectations across connected, multivendor environments becomes much and much, more complicated as as things go on. So we look to see how do we bring automation to give you a measure of compliance, help you fix this upfront, and then keep a track on it over time. The final challenge is a very well known one within the, the the kind of public health services, but also in some private health service as well. And this is around resources, so on financial funding, but also on personnel resources.

The idea of resource strain across these projects is different to different hospitals, but cyclical funding may mean that major spend is is placed on the priority at that point in time, and maybe the full consideration of the underlying infrastructure is not considered. So then it's a case of you have to respond with the budget that's available to you. Any spend that you do make is under huge scrutiny, and rapid time to value is expected. That doesn't also help when it's coupled with the fact that hospitals usually have to depend on the availability of local resources and their associated skills, and it also doesn't help that they're competing with the commercial markets as well. So we look to see how we can help reduce the strain on resources, standardize and democratize the access to information, make all resources more efficient, and make everyone capable of answering questions quicker so they can spend time on much higher value activities, where resources may be a little stray a little strained.

So, Darren, if you wanna go on in a bit more detail around the technicality of this, and then I'll come back and quickly frame what we're gonna cover in a product demonstration, and we'll dive straight into it. No. That's great. Thanks, John. So the the complexity of health care networks is clearly a key factor in all these challenges that we've just called out.

The problem is, of course, that that complexity is often necessary. So we talk about technical debt. Really, what that means is it is what it is. We've got a series of trade offs and compromises that we have to make in healthcare networks because of the wide range of services we have to support, which each bring their own technical requirements. For example, we might have medical imaging with its modalities and its servers, which often need to be on the same layer 2 network.

We might have patient monitoring systems that need multicast access to the sensors. We might have bedside patient record access on wireless tablets or access to systems from sources all over the place in the the trust zone data centers and regionalized private cloud environments and public cloud or Internet. We'll also have third party platforms in there delivering guest wireless and patient entertainment. All of these things wrapped up in strict security policies, which limit access to all these different pools of resource. Now as I mentioned, many of our systems provided by 3rd parties or external bodies, and these might be costly to move and change once they've been implemented so that they might have their own infrastructure separate from the wider network.

And all of this leads to interconnected pockets of network provision often from different vendors. These routers, switches, firewalls, wireless LAN controllers, load balancers, and so on may be traditional network plaque platforms access over each vendor's unique CLI. They may be software defined or cloud managed platforms accessed over GUI and then ultimately through an API presented on a controller. Or there may be public cloud platforms, AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and so on, operated and maintained through automated scripts and an API. In order to manage and maintain the complexity of these systems, you need to be able to document them in detail to ensure that they comply with both your intent for the environment and with regulatory and security policies.

And, of course, you've got to be able to troubleshoot it end to end. Typically, what this means is having a team of people with the range of skills and experience necessary to understand all the nuances of the different vendors and technologies that have been assembled to create your network. And then they need to be able to step through that network manually. Being able to to use those different access methods to discover the connectivity topology, analyze, verify that configuration, and the behavior of that mixed vendor environment. All of that just to be able to draw the topology diagrams by hand or in Visio, update the Excel spreadsheets with all the connectivity and IP addressing information, create the reports for those annual audits we talked about, and, of course, to be able to troubleshoot user issues.

But what if we could have an automated platform carrying out all that discovery for us to analyze and verify the network interconnectedness and behavior at regular points in time, tracking those changes and storing the results in a normalized vendor neutral form in a graph database with open access to the data for the people who have a use for it. Well, that's where IP fabric comes in. After a lightweight installation and a fast efficient discovery process, the platform is ready to start helping you by increasing your your increasing your efficiency by replacing those manual processes that you've used to support your network in the past. Through the user interface, you now get access to all of that data that you would have updated your spreadsheets with, but it's searchable. All the diagrams automatically assemble and filter to give you exactly the viewpoint you need.

Compliance checks to verify the behavior of your network as expected and mandated by your policies. And past simulations and gory forensic data about the state of the technologies that have been deployed in your network to accelerate troubleshooting. And once you started saving all of this time, you can now start innovating. Those APIs that underpin the web UI provide access to all of the data in the platform. So the IP fabric can be used as the engine for your automated network operations.

Imagine being able to discover new devices when they're added to the network, update your monitoring platform automatically, then go back to those same devices and run an automation script to update their configuration that allows them to be monitored. You could have a user raise a ticket in Remedy or ServiceNow that triggers a path check. The results from which are automatically added back to the ticket before the analyst or engineer even sees it. Or you could create an automatic ticket in the in the system when a specific behavior of the network goes out of compliance due to a change that's had unintended consequences. These are the kinds of things our community of partners and customers are working on right now with IP fabric at the heart of that ecosystem, collecting, analyzing, and generally making sense of their networks.

Right. Thanks, Darwin. So if we just slide on to the, the next page, it just pulls those challenges back into a very simple context, a simple type of question for which we will frame the the product demonstration, which we'll just dive into now. So the the key thing with technical debt and the key point that we're looking to, to deliver here is that the complexity associated with technical debt mean that simple questions such as what is in my network are reliant on outdated data sources, outdated documentation, maybe documentation that's been passed from project into managed service, out to consultants, to internal people that are expected to follow a manual data management and change process process that is really, really impossible to follow, when it's when it's changing hands so many times. So what we want here is a standardized dataset so that you can ask the question, what is in my network, and get up to date information in immense engineering detail for for any question that you may want to ask.

So this is a point in time checking what's available. Service continuity aspects and the challenges around it, this was around the, speed at which you can respond to an outage or a ticket or maybe even work to improve resiliency proactively. We're gonna focus here on troubleshooting. So what's happening in my network? How can I pull up a case, analyze the connectivity, and see what may be causing the issues that the monitoring system is screaming about?

Final one which we'll touch on here is compliance. So the question's around, is my network secured, and is it behaving as I expect it to? This may touch on regulatory. It may touch on compliance in terms of compliant configuration, or it may touch on the security posture, but we'll give you a very quick example of how you start to answer those questions. Again, this is due to just be a bit of a teaser, give you an idea of the platform capability.

So, hopefully, we can whet your appetite, and you can come back to us for a more detailed session. Over to you, Darren, if you wanna launch the platform. Great. Good to see you. There's you got it.

Yeah. Great stuff. So, yeah, while I could spend hours, guys, talking you through the capabilities of the platform, we just wanted to highlight these use cases that fit with the things we've covered today. So let's concentrate first on on technical debt. Those idiosyncrasies that have crept into your network over time which cause you issues.

You have a problem in one of your sites and you need to borrow a member of the team from another location who might not be familiar with some of the vendors, technologies, or features you're having to use to provide your service. How do you give them the familiarization and handover they need to bring them up to speed? Your documentation's out of date. You have a member of the team off sick. You had someone else who worked on a change last night and is sleeping it off, and you're running around resolving issues.

Luckily, IP Fabric, which is creating a snapshot of your network every day like the ones you see in front of you here, Has all the data in it to help any network analyst or engineer make sense of the environment. You have a full inventory of the devices in your network. The topology in which they're all connected and the hosts that they link to. Take an example. If you want to find where a particular host is connected, look in the host table.

Simply filter out, filter for an IP address of a device you you know of, and straight away you can see which switch and which switch port they're connected to. Could not be simpler. Imagine you want to prepare a routing change, and you need to see if there are any spare router interfaces. We know that in site 38, there's a series of routers. Let's go check and see what we can see.

Right? So we filter based on site 38. We filter whose host names based on whether they're a router or not, and we can check which interfaces are in a down down state. Straight away, we've got a list there of interfaces that we can use to deliver our change. From a compliance perspective, consider the case for example where Cisco have notified you that a specific code version is vulnerable to a particular security threat.

In this case, let's say, it's an Ios XE version. If we go into a, devices table in the family over here we select Ios Xe. And the particular version they've given us is a flavor of 316. Straight away we've got a list there of 3 devices that are impacted by this issue. We simply export that to the CSV, hand that over to an engineer who can go remediate those particular devices.

You may be concerned that you've got devices you can't renew the support for because they've gone end of life. We have an end of life milestone stable. Straight away, you can see instantly where devices have gone into sale, whether they're able to be maintained, and whether they're still eligible to be supported. So really simple inventory based compliance right there. But the compliance goes further than that.

If I open up the dashboard here, what we can see is a whole series of predefined verification checks, which can be used to assess compliance with best practice or indeed with your own configuration standards. These checks are carried out every time a snapshot is created. So daily, twice daily, however often you need them to be. And you can see here the sorts of the the sorts of things that come out of the box. You are able to build these checks based on any of the, any of the data that's in the system.

But we have, for example, the ability to check end to end, MTUs match on on interfaces or that your triple a and NTP are configured correctly or that your routing protocols are stable. Again, we're not going into the gory detail right now, but you can see the kinds of capability you have here and and really building up that, that online documentation. But in order to completely replace your static and out of date documentation, IP Fabric needs a good diagramming tool. Right? It needs to to be able to create those up to date visualizations of your network every time that snapshot is run.

So, of course, we have that capability in the platform. If I just drop into this site here, for example, you can create your own views of the, of the site to represent the topologies of the locations. You can look at them at different layers and the interconnectedness of of devices. So for example, you can see here we have the options of of layer 1, 2, and 3 if I zoom in on this guy. You can see the switch infrastructure here, how we identify that it's physically connected using CDP or LLDP and how it's connected at layer 2 using spanning tree.

And if I zoom it back out and scroll over to the left, you can see here we have a rooted topology. How, again, physically connected using CDP, but now using the routing, the routing tables in order to show adjacencies between them. And if we should so desire, we can enable OSPF neighbor relationships, for example, to see just how those devices are interacting. So a whole wealth of information there. And and as you, as you find other technologies that are being operated in the environment, so they will appear on on the list here as being able to be displayed on that topology.

But even better than that for when you're troubleshooting, we have the ability to do, end to end path checks. Imagine you have a user, in site 38 over here, 1038116112, who's trying to access, a particular a particular web server. Okay? He's using HTTP. We can put the details in here, and we can simulate a path check through the network between those hosts.

And as you can see, very quickly, we've got access to both the switched path and the rooted path through the network in order to get from first from user to default gateway, then into the WAN, across the MPLS network. And if you really, want to, let me just show you very quickly. You can see the MPLS tags themselves in the, in through the MPLS network. Out the other side into the data center environment through, routers, through switches, and through firewalls in order to get to that endpoint. You can see that very clearly where, where traffic has to pass through.

If we click on the firewall, you can see that it's both got, forwarding rules, I. E. Routing capability to get from source to destination, but also, zone matching rules meaning that that security policy is good to allow that that traffic to pass. But what if the, application provider decides they want to implement HTTPS on that? We simply change the, the port number and click submit.

And now we can see over here in in site 66, I'll zoom back in again. Our firewall's gone red. Why has our firewall gone red? If we click through, we can see the forwarding still looks good. We've got a green blob next to it, but our zone matching rules now have gone red.

And if we scroll across here, we can see we've got a deny, against, against the the host 124 policy. We go into the zone firewall and display host 124, we can see here the rules don't only allow HTTP and no HTTPS through there. So we would need to raise a change in order to allow the, the application team to start delivering that over HTTPS. That's the power, of the of the analysis and verification engine that sits underneath IP fabric to give you that that level of detail of information. The web user interface that you see here is built on top of this robust and complete rest API that provides access to all of that data.

It can all be exposed to the outside world. So you can build scripts and plugins and modules to integrate the intelligence in the platform with your wider network operations. So we've only scratched the surface here, obviously. If you're interested in seeing more, and, when we're done here, you can contact us to arrange a full demonstration. We'll open up for questions now if that's okay.

If anyone has anything they'd like to ask. Joe, is there anything in the in the chat? Nothing in the type chat. So, guys, if there's any questions, feel free to ask them now, and we will be, sharing the recording afterwards as well. Let me see if I can alright.

Just unmuting everybody just in case you want to, to talk up. I can hear you manually unmuting. Okay. That's about as good as this gets on Frank. No questions?

No questions. Guys, you you're unmuted now, but, manually on mute. So if you just unmute if you've got any questions. Okay. So I guess we can wrap up.

Everyone's desperate to get, get started on their evening. Certainly. Brilliant. Okay. So there was just one chat saying nice product, and I'm, glad for that feedback.

So, guys, thank you very much for joining. We will share the recording, and, feel free to get in touch if you want to see a lot more detail around how the platform's deployed, how it operationally gets set up, or or what impact it can particularly have on your organization. We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks, Darren. Thanks for your time, everybody.

Thanks, Darren. Guys. Bye. Cheers.