In our increasingly technology-reliant world, most modern enterprises cannot achieve sustainable growth without an adaptive IT environment. That’s why having a stable, adaptable network makes the difference between a business that is succeeding and one that is struggling to keep its operations above water. Employees and customers alike depend on an enterprise’s network to do their jobs and conduct business. In other words, when the network fails, the business and its operations fail, too.

Leaders in the IT industry have turned their attention to creating a network solution that evens out the bumps in the road. If you are looking for a smooth connection process, Cisco DNA Center is for you.

The post Start Simplifying The Complex DNA of Your Network appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

To build a lasting house, you must first build a strong foundation. Without a strong foundation, you cannot build whatever you desire on it. The same principle can be applied to a data center. A data center requires a well-designed and stable infrastructure that offers the required agility to accommodate dynamically changing technology environments. Ultimately, this ensures greater longevity.

Meaningful Intention From Day One

Your company isn’t driven by technology, but by conducting good business. Your company’s mission statement, its goals, and objectives also derive around the intentions of the business. Shouldn’t your data center be driven by those intentions as well? Your competitors have access to the same technology as you. The differentiator today is how your technology is implemented so that it maximizes the full business potential of your organization. In today’s digitally transformed world, your applications are the tools of business. Maximum resiliency of your network infrastructure is critical for the success of your business operations.

Intent-based networking (IBN) utilizes artificial intelligence, machine learning, and orchestration to ensure that the data center remains true to the intentions of the business. is an IBN software-enabled solution that uses automation to prescribe and perform routing tasks and policies so that every component and dependency is on the same page. Should the data center color outside the lines of business intent, Juniper Apstra alerts team members and performs automated remediation if applicable, to ensure that things return as they should.

Purposeful Configuration

Nobody enjoys the process of manually configuring network devices, yet legacy networks rely on this ancient and mundane practice. Ultimately, this action opens the door to human error. Early attempts at automating these tasks were utilizing the same networking approach that required network engineers and administrators to specify configuration as a series of sequenced actions that told devices what they should do. Instead, IBN uses a declarative networking approach that defines the desired result.

Juniper Apstra takes business outcomes described by humans and converts them into configurations that are automatically generated and deployed to their rightful location. Because the system knows the desired outcome for each specific configuration, it continually works to maintain those outcomes through whatever challenge may present itself. Call it configuration with a purpose that is void of fat fingering and neglectful configuration errors that plague manual configuration deployments.

The Main Challenge With Traditional Data Center Implementation

In many ways, the traditional data center was a labyrinth of technology complexity that was comprised of shortcomings. Inefficient design processes made data center management highly reactionary because of elongated time periods required to implement or scale technology. The proprietary nature of legacy data centers resulted in vendor lock that restricted the ability of enterprises to adapt their technology to changing business conditions.

Eventually, these proprietary systems created silos that restricted workflows and required highly specialized skill sets that are now proving difficult to find and retain. IT teams lacked the necessary visibility to truly understand what was happening in a data center that boasted so many moving parts and interdependencies. Even when visibility was attainable, it required IT teams to swivel between multiple admin consoles, creating critical gaps in monitoring abilities.

Day Zero Cost

What does all this have to do with Day Zero costs? Well, everything. According to a recent study by Forrester that examined the economic impact of Juniper Apstra, companies that used Juniper’s IBN data center solution experienced significant cost savings. That’s because scoping and design time were reduced by 60% thanks to the reduced number of FTE hours required to design and prepare for these mammoth projects. This means a faster time to market for your data center and an accelerated ROI. Forrester estimates that the average organization using Juniper Apstra could implement a new data center in half the time of their existing data center, and realize a Zero Day savings rate of $73,000 in the first two years.

Future Dividends of Juniper Apstra

Many investors love stocks that pay tangible dividends because of regular return on investment. It’s the same with Juniper’s IBN approach. By ensuring that every infrastructure device is configured correctly the first time through step-by-step validation, your Juniper Apstra design will continue to pay dividends across the full life of the data center. Enforced and automated validation leads to greater stability and uptime, which means that your mission critical apps are operating more. The Forrester study cited a reduced implementation time by as much as 83%. Additionally, there are the benefits of managing a multivendor solution environment from a single admin console as well as the decreased reliance on IT teams to monitor and troubleshoot the network infrastructure.

Conclusion

Data center efficiency, stability, scalability, and resiliency begins on Day Zero, which is why an IBN approach from the very outset of your next data center project is so critical. Juniper Apstra incorporates AI, network orchestration and machine learning to ensure that every step involved in your next data center implementation is purposely intentioned and validated so that it works for the benefit of your business from beginning to end.

Next Steps: to learn how Juniper Apstra relieves the pain points mentioned above, staying the course with your network, and how to achieve cost savings across your network’s lifecycle.

The post Proving Its Value: A Day Zero Cost Analysis of Juniper Apstra appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

This summer and fall, our team has written a great deal on how Juniper Networks’ intent-based networking (IBN) technology is helping companies automate the configuration, deployment, and management of enterprise data center components. We’ve identified how IBN validates the operational state of the network to ensure that it matches its slated intentions. That’s important because in the end, your technology investments are only effective if they further the business objectives of the organization. IBN prevents your technology directives from going adrift.

But what about security? Security must always be part of any discussion involving new technology solutions due to the prevalence of cyberattacks that originate from an ever-expanding threat landscape. The increasing risk factors that companies face today are forcing them to adapt zero-trust security strategies to reduce their threat exposure. Juniper Apstra not only complies with a zero-trust security mandate, but it also helps enforce it.

Automation

Let’s roll the imaginary film and picture a typical bank robbery or museum heist in which the burglars case the building to study the patterned behavior of security guards and other personnel. People are the weak links in any security situation. It is why cybercriminals rely so heavily on phishing attacks to deliver their malicious code and malware payloads. One way to reduce your attack surface and attain greater security is by automating as many manual processes as possible.

This automation should start with device configuration as manual configuration opens the door to fat fingering or leaving checkboxes neglected by mistake. Juniper Asptra will create your configurations automatically, validate those configurations, and then deploy properly so you know they are done correctly the first time. This is also good for large, scaled implementations.

Next comes the policies that govern your traffic flows. IBN converts business language into applicable network rules so that the emphasis is placed on business objectives rather than network protocols. You can also pre-stage your security policies, allowing your team to visualize their impact and take appropriate recourse, if necessary.

Complete Visibility

You can’t protect what you can’t see. Juniper Apstra gives you a holistic view of your data center environment that allows you to not only see what is in your data center, but to also visually understand how all the pieces relate to one another. Juniper Apstra’s monitoring orchestrator can keep your IT teams informed of suspicious events such as the creation of new agents, processes, or connections. When such events are identified, the IBN system will immediately issue alerts to your team and roll back the changes automatically if desired.

System Uptime

Threat actors don’t implement their primary attack immediately upon their entry into a network. Instead, they spend an appropriate amount of time conducting reconnaissance to identify high-value targets and learn what security tools and measures you have in place to protect them. These invaders will often implement one or more preliminary attacks on your backup systems and security systems to take them out of commission, thus improving the odds of their primary attack. Juniper Apstra can monitor all the components in your security arsenal to ensure that they remain up and operational to protect your environment. Now your security systems can’t be meddled with without your knowledge.

Network Segmentation

While zero-trust security is the goal, chances are, some type of threat will inevitably penetrate your IT estate. That’s why resiliency is a primary objective. Network segmentation helps ensure resiliency by keeping ransomware, trojans and other types of malicious code at bay. Intent-based segmentation interprets business and security requirements and converts them into segmentation policies that spans your entire distributed network. It can isolate applications and other privileged areas from standards users and workloads. This will curb the spread of a malware attack, giving your IT security teams ample time to thwart the invasion. Juniper Apstra delivers network segmentation at scale and continually validates these segmentation policies to adjust them in real time, if necessary.

Confirmed Traffic Patterns

In an IBN, everything is driven by intent, and that includes your network traffic flows. Juniper Apstra gives you the visibility to see the actual traffic flows of your network. Know where traffic is originating and where it is going regardless of its encryption status. You can’t spot anomalies if you cannot identify what your typical traffic flows look like.

More Time for Innovation

By automating your configuration, deployment and monitoring tasks, your IT staff has more time to spend on cybersecurity initiatives such as disaster recovery efforts, incident response plans, and what-if scenarios. Juniper Apstra allows your IT staff to swap out the mundane manual tasks that they don’t like anyway for value added projects that there was never time to do before.

Conclusion

Intent-based networking translates into intent-based security. Through automation, enhanced visibility, alert management and policy-based segmentation, Juniper Apstra can help deliver the zero-trust security that security minded organizations are vying for today. Find out how Juniper Apstra not only delivers on greater productivity and efficiencies within the data center, but security as well.

Next Steps: to learn how Juniper Apstra relieves the pain points mentioned above, staying the course with your network, and how to achieve cost savings across your network’s lifecycle.

The post Zero-Trust Security Strategy With Juniper Networks’ Intent-Based Networking appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Enterprise technology vendors bombard IT leaders everywhere with messaging that emphasizes the value or added value that their solutions provide. However, value is an open-ended term, and as a consequence, eventually loses its effectiveness.

On the other hand, measured value is a whole other matter. The ability to assign a quantitative value to a respective solution allows for more informed decision making. That’s why Juniper Networks commissioned to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) that an organization might realize from a Juniper Apstra deployment.

Juniper Apstra is an intent-based networking (IBN) software-based solution that automates and validates everyday processes that make up the design, deployment, and operational stages of a large data center. The stages are often referred to as Day 0 through Day 2+. While it certainly works with other Juniper Network switches and products, it is vendor agnostic, thus providing deployment and management agility for those that utilize it.

In its study, Forrester interviewed four separate enterprises and then aggregated the collected data into a single composite organization. This organization utilized two major production centers, employed 7,500 people, and earned $3 billion in annual revenue. Prior to their Juniper Apstra implementations, all four organizations struggled with the typical challenges faced by many enterprises today:

• Inefficient design processes
• Overreliance on manual configuration tasks
• Endless event tracking
• Perpetual system updates that absorbed too much time away from understaffed IT teams

Day 0: Design Cost Savings

Time is money, especially when quantifying the time spent for an elongated IT project. The Forrester study showed that Juniper Apstra reduced the number of FTE hours required in the design phase of a new data center by 60%. By shrinking requirement scoping and design time, Forrester was able to quantify a savings of $73,000 within the first two years. Much of these savings were due to the preconfigured templates that designers can utilize without any preparation on their part. After all, you don’t want your high-priced engineers creating their own templates.

Day 1: Deployment Savings

Deployments never seem to go as smoothly as expected. Thankfully, Juniper Apstra can ensure that the deployment of your data center goes as planned. That’s because every device configuration is validated before deployment to ensure that the results match the intent of the configuration. Configurations are automatically generated so there’s no opportunity of fat fingering a device. Juniper Apstra also ensures that all cabling is in place correctly.

To sum up Day 1, Apstra eliminates all the “gotchas” that usually plague deployments. And all those “gotchas” represent real, precious dollars. The Forrester study estimates that implementation time can be reduced from 24 hours to 2 hours, per device, equating to a cost savings of $72,000 over the course of three years.

Day 2: Operational Savings

The brunt of savings takes place once the data center is operational, $448,000 to be exact, according to the study. Much of these savings is due to the reduced reliance on senior-level engineers that data centers have traditionally depended on to remain running. Forrester estimates that organizations can expect a 60% reduction in FTE hours, equating to nearly 2,500 labor hours less per year for their composite organization. That’s because so many actions can be automated with the Juniper Apstra platform. No more script writing or swiveling admin consoles to multitask!

Tool Replacement Cost Savings

IT teams have traditionally used multiple third-party tool sets to manage the data center. Forrester assigned a license cost of $80,000 as the average annual license cost per tool. On average, Juniper Apstra replaces two legacy tools that also provide far more functionality. In addition, IT personnel don’t have to be trained in future third party tools and managers don’t have to spend time procuring them. All of this constitutes a sizable expected savings rate of $358,107 over a three-year period.

Creating Real, Measurable Value

The Juniper Apstra intent-based networking solution is an example of the commitment that Juniper has toward creating real, measurable value for its customers. This is substantiated by a study conducted by IDC in which they interviewed companies worldwide that have deployed Juniper products and technology solutions in their data centers. Organizations that participated in the study had just over 5,400 IT users on average and hosted 100 business applications. In addition to non-quantitative benefits such as greater agility and reliability, IDC calculated a savings of $51,121 per 100 internal application users, constituting a $2.77 million savings on average. Study participants experienced a 361% ROI over 5 years, a 56% cost reduction in operational costs and an 11-month payback period.

Conclusion

While value may be a relative term, the measurable value that Juniper delivers with their product line is substantiated and quantified. Juniper Apstra is the latest example of how intent-based networking is revolutionizing how companies design, deploy and manage the modernized data center today. Of course, cost savings should never be the sole reason to decide on a technology solution. The value of Juniper Apstra goes far beyond any quantifiable formula.

Juniper Apstra ensures that the intent of your data center matches your business intentions so that your data center performs as first envisioned. With Juniper Apstra, you can realize the power of intent along with the cost savings of automated analytics. Find out more about this powerful combination by contacting a WEI IBN expert today.

Next Steps: to learn how Juniper Apstra relieves the pain points mentioned above, staying the course with your network, and how to achieve cost savings across your network’s lifecycle.

The post Four Ways IBN Creates Measurable Business Value appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.

Modernized data centers require a great deal of investment and planning to be implemented and deployed correctly. As an IT leader, you must deploy the data center properly from the outset and ensure that it operates the way it was intended across its entire lifecycle. Otherwise, your enterprise will never realize its full potential and miss out on valuable ROI. While there are many challenges in building, operating, and supporting a data center today, we have identified five highly preventable pain points that companies find themselves struggling with today. The good news is that today’s intent-based networking (IBN) solutions such as Juniper Apstra can permanently relieve these common pain points.

1. Budget and Resource Limitations

Over the past two years, nearly every business has contended with limitations in the form of personnel shortages or limited supply chains. The higher cost of borrowing and financing further accentuates the challenge of starting a new data center project. Companies can no longer afford the traditional practice of overprovisioning. Instead, they need a holistic view that proactively determines predicted demands and match it with proportional resource capacities in real time. Additionally, data centers can no longer be dependent on manual processes because understaffed IT teams don’t have the means to constantly put out fires, troubleshoot, or update systems every day.

By leveraging advanced tool sets that are backed by automated analytics and machine learning, small IT staffs comprised of skilled personnel can get more out of your data center with less. IBN can vastly reduce the time it takes to plan and implement a data center. It can streamline and automate common operational tasks such as:

• Upgrades
• Configuration changes
• Monitoring
• Remediation

As a result, data center operations are no longer limited by your shorthanded IT staff or budget limitations.

2. Agility

Just as server virtualization allowed companies to escape the inelastic nature of hardware systems, companies need to find other ways to inject greater agility into their data centers. The agile approach to software development has accelerated the pace of new releases and updates to systems and applications. Companies must now ensure that their data centers can keep pace as well. Unfortunately, too many companies remain saddled with technical debt, brittle legacy technologies, and poor visibility into their IT estates. But speed is only part of the equation, however. IT teams must have a means of predicting the results of accelerated configuration changes in advance to ensure that new services and configurations are deployed carefully.

Only intelligent automation can keep pace with the fluid nature of software code. Because Juniper Apstra is technology agnostic, it can orchestrate multiple devices using prescribed templates and automation. Proposed designs and configuration changes can also be validated prior to deployment, giving admin teams the proper insight into the impact of those changes. This ensures that the end results are indeed matching the original intentions. Data centers might be composed of brick and mortar, but IBN will elasticize them.

3. Poor Reliability

Manually dependent processes are suspect to human error. That’s just a fact. A frivolous fat finger configuration mistake could invoke real consequences that disrupt your enterprise’s critical workflows. Human dependency also occurs when configurations aren’t documented or mapped out. Thus, when a key member of your team leaves, a valuable knowledge base walks out the door with them. Given this transient era of employment, perhaps this pain point rings a little louder.

can improve datacenter reliability by taking the human element out of as many basic processes as possible. By automating and validating these tasks, the chance of error is vastly reduced. Once deployed, every validated change is documented as part of a bigger process that maps out the entire inner workings of your data center. This gives all members of your staff equal access to all information.

4. Slow Deployments

Slow and steady is no longer applicable in a 24/7 world. You must stay ahead of your competition, both from a business perspective as well as a technological one. Being towards the end of the pack results in lost opportunities and increased costs. Whether you need to implement an entire data center or deploy a simple system update, Juniper Apstra can reduce the necessary provisioning time to get the job done quickly, while ensuring that it is done correctly as well.

5. Lack of Infrastructure choice

Everyone likes having options no matter the scenario. Options create opportunities that lead to success. Unfortunately, when you let a single vendor dictate your technology choices, you essentially surrender your freedom of choice. Contrary to what they believe, what is good for your top vendor isn’t necessarily good for you. There is real value in having a system controller for your data center, but only if it has the flexibility to support multiple vendors and devices. Juniper Apstra integrates with some of the biggest vendor names in the hardware and software industries including Cisco, Arista, Microsoft, Cumulus Networks, and of course, Juniper Networks.

Conclusion

You may not be currently contending with all these common pain points, but there’s probably one or two worth relating to. And as every scenario can be different, you probably have other pain points not mentioned here. Whatever the case, an IBN approach can help you alleviate them. IBN is a new concept, and one that can’t be fully understood in a single blog. That’s why we invite you to speak with one of our IBN experts at WEI that can fully explain this new empowering way to design, implement and manage next data center project.

Next Steps: to learn how Juniper Apstra relieves the pain points mentioned above, staying the course with your network, and how to achieve cost savings across your network’s lifecycle.

The post Five Data Center Pain Points That IBN Solves appeared first on IT Solutions Provider - IT Consulting - Technology Solutions.