K. So thank you everyone for for joining us here today for the click, consume, and innovate webinar from IP Fabric. We're gonna be looking at trends across 2020 and a bit more of a forward view on innovation as we as we coin it here the innovation delivery service for retail in 2021. So we've all experienced the dramatic market shift throughout this year, where the only certainty has realistically been uncertainty. Demand for new home delivery models and a boom of online shoppers from previously unreachable demographic groups have created challenges but also opportunity and, both in abundance.

Despite these market conditions, where you would maybe hope that customers would lower their guard or not have such high expectations, actually, seamless customer experience across multichannel engagements. This is whether it's a team quickly connecting from the phone, an elderly person maybe trying to use a laptop, an iPad, or calling customer service, and then maybe getting support logged on to someone else's device, they expect this multichannel experience to be completely seamless. And achieving this, in line with delivering this new home delivery capacity, has been put in unprecedented but also unpredicted demands on network infrastructure and, of course, on the teams managing them. The businesses which have found opportunity in these conditions are those which have delivered delivered their innovative quickly and securely, gaining customer trust in the process. When translated into technical requirements, this focuses the need for IT leadership to deliver available services which are secure and compliant to the ongoing expectations of the business.

My name is Joe Kershaw, and I'm the channel development lead here at IP Fabric. I work with our ecosystem of global partners as well as some of our strategic direct customers, basically in helping them to understand where the development of automated technology and network assurance can help them control some of the risks in the open market, but also deliver infrastructure and connectivity services back to the business that help innovation thrive. Also got with me, Jason. Hello. My name is Jason Broadbent.

I'm a system engineering manager for IP Fabric. I've been in network field for my whole career, which spans many years. I've been involved in design and architect and enterprise, search providers, mobile, and many data centers over the years. More recently, I've been involved in software defined networking and cloud solutions and provide an important multi cloud architectures. I've been involved my whole life in learning and using digital transformation, and I'm part of that digital transformation journey myself into the new innovative offerings that IP Fabric offer, and hence why I joined the company.

Great. Thanks, Jason. We will be posting a recording of this session afterwards on YouTube once we've edited it. So please do not hesitate to get in touch with us afterwards. We're available for 1 to 1 discussions and, of course, targeted demonstrations for you and your teams or organization.

So just reach out to us. So what what I wanted to touch on just before we dive into this picture is is kind of a quick overview of IP Fabric. So So IP Fabric as a technology is an automated network assurance platform, and we've been working with global grocery store groups, hypermarkets, and consumer retail chains. And in this webinar, we're gonna touch on some of the insights from working with the technical teams in these retail brands and working with them to help deliver the innovation, which in turn has driven consistent customer experience. So retail, specifically, more so than any other industry, is a sector in which competition, performance fluctuations, and customer loyalty are driven and repeatedly disrupted by customer experience.

How your existing or prospective customers are perceiving your brand or how they perceive a brand of any service provider is underpinned by 2 intertwining elements of trust and innovation of service. If your services are sitting still, you could be sure neither your customers nor your competition are. So the the experience up until this year, so standard market conditions, read, not 2020, with the dynamic nature of retail, there is a bunch of different challenges involved there for technical teams to deliver against. Multichannel experiences, demographic groups with particular behavior and expectations, low margins across the industry, which drive laser focus on efficiency. These are all constant drivers in the market.

And managing these drivers to deliver trusted customer experience is a is is the standard expectation within retail. The past driver of proximity and convenience, the world where, you know, popping back to my local shop because I forgot to pick up bread or a newspaper or flowers or anything else is no longer possible, whether that's due to the particular government restrictions in your area, your own health risk, or in some cases, disrupted stock and services at a local store. So the the switch from proximity and convenience to more health and safety and rapid delivery is what we're now calling the new normal. Against these expectations and the ability of of myself or or any of the population now to go online, order from the comfort of your own sofa, and have delivery in under 24 hours. And the fact that this is almost mandated in most areas means that no longer is it proximity and convenience.

It's now stock and delivery slot availability. That's the only thing that drives customer loyalty. So what happens when services aren't being delivered fast enough, or perhaps innovation is being blocked, and customer loyalty is only only kind of tagged onto, delivery slots or sanitary delivery experience, It means that businesses have to innovate faster in order to make more slots available as the demand rises. What we've seen across Europe is, some of these grocery stores and household names have been having to launch innovative partnerships. They've had to maintain pace of this demand by, inviting in partnerships with off-site disruptive competitors or at least disruptors within their market, and basically allow these services to be delivered out to their customers, but not necessarily through their own means anymore.

So what we're gonna talk around now is is what that market demand and that opening of an ecosystem means when it's dropped down into technical requirements for network engineers, security teams, and, of course, the leadership across the whole packet. The market demand for fast innovation, coupled with the fact that security is taken for granted, represents exciting challenges, but when translated into technical requirements for implementation by CIO, IT directors, and their leadership teams is a complex conflict, of different challenges to be managed. Let's take the innovative ecosystem example of, say, Morrisons partnering with Deliveroo or Carrefour with Uber Eats, during this lockdown situation. So we've touched already on the customer expectations. I want to be able to click on my device, whatever that device is, whatever the time of day is, and basically get my food almost instantly delivered.

As real as makes no difference, instant delivery is basically the demand. When that's passed into business requirements, we've touched on these partner ecosystems. So being able to open up our our own capacity and our own capability to delivery partners or other service providers, perhaps, internal IT service providers, contractors, or anyone to basically help us manage that scale. And we have to be able to do that quickly as demands change overnight, but also securely. As these business demands translate down into technical requirements, the technical requirements of always available, flexible and scalable, plus a measure on continuous compliance are complex enough requirements in standard scenario IT operations.

Whereas now as the the scope and scale is expected to double in a lot of cases and customer expectations are following suit, the challenges, can only be addressed by adopting innovative technologies, whether you're looking at software defined networking for store connectivity, multi cloud integrated services for scale and performance, and a multitude of endpoint security and authentication mechanisms. These are all grouped together to deliver secure services at scale with the ability to make sure they're always on. Now the unfortunate point is that even though the demand has doubled, available resource in terms of staff, it may be expected that you will manage this with the existing and already strained network engineering pool or technical engineering pool. And so that that means that automated support is required, ideally yesterday. So looking into automated support now, it's difficult to maintain or to to manage to deliver immediate value back to the business and start getting gains from this technology without months of building, without months of deployment and integration, and a steep learning curve.

This is where IP Fabric comes in. IP Fabric's automated network assurance platform is extremely simple to deploy and delivers value from day 1. What we're gonna talk you through here are a couple of the automated tools within IP Fabric. This everything we'll show you is within a single deployment. It's not a case of a modulated purchase of many different pieces.

It's a simple deployment and simple to get your hands on these tools. So we're gonna touch on, some of the tools around baselining and verification. So on a scale of international distributed infrastructure, how do you maintain a baseline of what do we have in production, what was happening before a change, and what state are we in after the change, and being able to measure, business compliance, security compliance, and everything else. So we'll touch on a point of baselining and verification. We'll then move into, an element of behavior analysis because when you're managing such a a huge distributed network, the case is is no longer sufficient to know that a device is up or down.

You need to know impact of change. You need to be able to look at overarching behavior and deployment of technology to be able to predict where potential outages may occur before they do. But then, of course, these these outages do happen or these issues do happen sometimes, So it's about being able to respond respond to the changing business requirements by having flexible technology, but also respond to any potential network outages, by pinpointing verified true data and being able to very quickly visualize that and share and collaborate with the teams. The idea is with this automated support, the customer facing delivery can be seamless, trust can be gained as expected, and the fluctuations of poor customer loyalty can be avoided from impacting business to too much of an extent. So, Jason, as I've highlighted these tools, do you want to, take over and launch the platform, and we can walk through a bit of a demonstration?

Okay. Yep. So the challenges of delivering true insights, awareness, and fundamentally understanding how our architectures behaving is always the challenges. With IP Fabric, we're empowering engineers with the visibility to provide you with the insights with what's at risk. If we're going to deliver an always available service, the first things that you need is that visibility, the insight into the configuration and state from that individual devices through to complete understanding and behavior of the network as a whole.

So this is where IP Fabric helps. From a discovery process, we extract the configuration and state data from not just the CLI, but from the APIs for a range of holistic view from all vendors across on premises and cloud based architecture. Iprefabric analyzes and takes that data and transforms it into a consistent view in a single place, the device to a device level, and it will also create a network level model with the relationships and interactions between those devices and domains. So, ultimately, IP Fabric provides you that access to that broad and deep network data in a single place instead of looking in multiple areas and and scraping that information together. So from, from a single overview, we can quite simply identify compliance of how our infrastructure is behaving.

We have the insight into the architectural overview, and we'll dig into the information of how we can provide not only end to end state, but also how we can provide that overlay of protocols as well. So instead of going through how do we test a host is there by using ping or trash through for a connection, we can be more intelligent and provide you with a more deep information to give you that, decision making criteria to understand if it's behaving as intended. And the network engineer has access to all that data. He always did, but now it's in that one place, as I said. It's accessible, it's searchable, and it's visual, which is really key.

So, again, it makes it very simple to get to the root cause to understand the baseline of what good looks like. And if we're going to do any type of investigation, then we need to have that rich data. So if if we quickly start looking into what we provide, so from from an in inventory perspective, we collect all the devices, and we start building any type of compliance statements about what what it should behave, what we believe is good, what we believe possibly could be bad. So, again, you can start investigating, what the behavior of of your environment looks like. That visibility is really key where we can start understanding the the landscape of the devices, the mixture of those devices, and also understand, any type of change control, what that behavior may have.

We also need to quickly visualize it as well. So if we can visualize, our particular diagram, so again, we collate all your remote locations, not only your data centers, but also every aspect of connectivity. And we do that through, the CLI state, and we'll quickly, identify how we do that. But from from a very simple screen overview, we can now start seeing how our, remote sites, logical site 66 looks to to to ourselves. Not only do we have the physical connectivity now, but we're starting to understand the overall protocols that are running over it as well.

So we can see a lot more information than just a ping. Yes. It has successfully reached the other destination. If we're looking to do changes, so we now identified that as a retail organization, we need to start partnering with with another, business for for a delivery service. So, therefore, we may need to open up some type of security policies, any type of physical connections.

We may wanna add some resilience to this, but we don't have that information previously. It's just a a a manageable, understanding of our if our links are up and down. We can quickly identify where those problems may exist before we happen. So we now know that a change control has been identified because we have a single point of failure on a firewall. And our project manager has now asked us what impact does that have?

How many users are going to to to suffer from a change control? Can we do that within a normal time window frame? Or do we have to allocate resource within a weekend and and and spend a lot of time and money to to to create that resource. So, again, from a from a perspective of database, we can actually now verify all our host connectivity. And if we search for our our site 66 that we are going to do that change control through, we now simply identify which users will have that impact.

And we can now share that information collaboratively either through a unique URL connection. So we can share that where we can now send that to our technical teams, or we can send that to to our project management so he can look at the long list of of users that have been identified. And, again, now we're starting to paint our picture. We're starting to deliver a a true representation of how our environment looks like very simply and very straightforwardly by interacting with the data that we have now collected. So so now we would like to see if what that change represents.

What has been added or removed during time slots, and, again, creating an understanding of how our environment has been adapted over the previous months. The additions that have had to be made to be innovative as an organization to to adapt to to the changes of the the environments that we're seeing, out outside. So, again, there's a lot of, solutions being added and and adjusted accordingly to allow, integrations very quickly. So, again, we we can start doing some, you know, a a a a a a compare and contrast. So we we've actually made a change.

We're aware we're going to make a change, but we're not quite certain, what that impact will have on on on a configuration aspect. So I can take from a snapshot, that we've made previously before the change, and we can do a comparison to what that change has had. And we can quickly identify what devices have been added, removed through through through that time. And and this is very simple and very straightforward to now understand how this is impacting our business, how we can quickly identify change control. And we know local stores and and local retail organizations are are doing their own additions and and removal of devices be because of the impact that they're seeing.

But this now gives us that view of what's being changed and what what's happening within store. So we've made those changes. We've made those additions. We've made those those removal of devices to to allow us to integrate into our partner community. Now how does that impact our our server connectivity from our our data centers into the partner data centers?

So what what we can now actually do from a technical point perspective is now we can start looking at an end to end path. We can identify an address of of a of a server that needs to now talk to our partner server over, a a traditional port, will that function? Will that work? You know, we we don't actually real really understand all the policies and and all the, configurations that have been done because many teams owe many different aspects of that environment. So what the security teams may do may not be necessarily conveyed across to the network organization.

So, again, by having this information at hand, we can start collaboratively working together within teams and sharing that information and also quickly identify any problems. So now we can see by making that change, our firewall has has has stopped that, change from actually functioning. And this is down to a a a a a a firewall denied policy that's been put in place from a previous configuration to to make sure that it was secure prior to our partnership. So we now know that before changes can happen, we need to identify that, firewall policy and to change that before we can do our networking piece. So, again, we're collaboratively sharing information.

We're aware of the impact of that change control before it actually happens, And now we're intelligently making decisions to to keep our always available, intent in mind. So if we move forward into to how we respond to this, you know, Now we understand, you know, our our inventory and our baseline information. We know what good looks like. We we understand what the impact of change control, is having through not only of of changing connectivity to our partners and opening that up to a bigger ecosystem. We're also collaboratively sharing information to our security teams to make them aware of the of the impact that they're having within our our new collaborations.

We're now also understanding how our environment looks like generally as well. So because we have all that data and because we we now can start understanding, the true intent of our environment, you know, we have our monitoring tools. They have many thousands of messages that are always populating and will continue to do so. But does that provide you with the information as quickly as you need to do? If we're going through that threat threat hunting, we need to be efficient.

We need to quickly establish performance and impact as we've discussed. And these deficiencies from from a management's environment where we're just either doing simple awareness campaigns is is not good enough for today's environment. Where networks are very easy to break but very hard to fix. And that's why our Snapshot system is very easy to use and captures that information and make it makes a massive impact to to to how we support our environment as, network engineers. And and and things, you know, try and make it easier.

So if we're as a technologist, you know, we need to start really understanding the impact of traffic, the increase of traffic. We now understand the demographics of people are changing. More and more people are accessing that information. So have we designed our environment good enough to allow that type of extra traffic to function in our environment? And something so difficult but yet so simple to to to show is we've we've invested a vast amount of money in in our connectivities and to make sure that, you know, it's always available.

It's highly highly resilient. But, yeah, all our traffic ratios are still distributed over one link. So although we can physically see that we have high availability, we can now actually quite identify quite easily that traffic distribution is not good enough. So now we can start investigating very quickly into that information as well. So a very simple view of how to look at traffic, that how traffic will grow, and how we as as engineers within our environment can quickly establish what we need to do before that impact becomes, seen and becomes impactful to to our consumers.

Also, if we're looking for security implicate implications as well. So it's something very standard, you know, as as an SMP. You know, we've now opened up our, collaboration to partners through our simple search buttons. Our host, we can now have a look at our SNMP configurations. And it and and it's very very simple, process to to to identify, but very hard process to actually see across the whole environment what that impact may have.

So from a security procedure, you can now see we have standard configurations and default configurations still distributed across on our environment. We can locate those hosts and those sites where they are and quickly then make those changes to allow integrations more seamlessly and to make sure that our security posture is actually maintained. And if we wanted to do it by, you know, on a on a side by side basis, we can now investigate into a a a local site and say, right, I I don't believe I have the correct configurations for that environment. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm gonna make sure to see if I've got my compliance meets. And quite simply and quite straightforwardly, you can start to see that IP fabric has started to warn you of possible issues on those switches.

So if we then just quickly investigate that, we can now start seeing that our SNMP community names, our configurations are not quite correct. So we now need to have a look at why public is still being used and the configuration of our own business has not been changed to to allow, that security posture to be maintained. So very simply, very straightforwardly, we give you that information to to to allow you to to to manage and capture the network data that is available to us at any point, but we want to paint you that picture quickly. When you paint that picture efficiently, fundamentally, we want to make sure that all your postures and policy has been enforced and your network is behaving as as as it should. So, again, we are delivering that ability to compare and contrast data network to deliver that insight to be responsive to the business.

Is there any questions? Thank you. Just give it a couple of minutes for guys to send some questions in on chat. Sure. I'll just stop sharing for the moment.

So if there are no questions, Joe, then over to you. Sure. Thanks, Jason. So that concludes the content for the the webinar today. I believe, potentially, something come through here.

Uh-huh. So just got an interesting question come through from John, which is, is it possible to use the data as an input for automation? Some That's that's a that's a great question. And and some things, yeah, we we did overlook because of of of what we're trying to concentrate on. But, yeah, IP fabric is based on on on an open API architecture.

What what we can deliver is a a we we can show the visibility of that API and integrate it into any type of orchestration platforms. So, again, from an an an an automated point of view, we can then integrate into PRTG for any type of trend analysis that you may see as important. So, again, your your business stakeholders may want to see the transformations and and the trends that have happened over the previous few months. We we can open our API and then create a script to integrate into the likes of PTRG serve or ServiceNow to start delivering that trend analysis and give you that insight. Yep.

I think, a couple of customers that we've worked with as well, which should be I think would be, insightful here, are using open source automation frameworks or open automation frameworks, the likes of Ansible and Nournia. And they're using IP Fabric to basically remove the requirement completely for collection of data, validation of compliance, and standardization of multivendor environments. So that information can be pushed via plug in to Ansible to Nournia and basically speed up the time it takes to begin delivering that transformation impact. Absolutely. And and and the the the the important part of this is because we've done that becomes very easy and very straightforward.

So so, again, you know, we have that central data repository then to allow you then to to make those, automated decisions from those different platforms. K. So if there's no more questions, then we'll stop it here, and we will be, making the recording available online, and it'll be shared with all the attendees from today as well. So we look forward to hearing from you. If you want to reach out to us directly, our contact details will, of course, be on the email when we send out the recording.

And we, thank you again for joining, and we look forward to hearing from you. Thanks, Jason. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye.