Improve efficiency and security with network automation

As your company’s network grows, your IT team faces some extraordinary challenges. Tasks like managing device configurations and handling compliance auditing become much more time-consuming and difficult as your network becomes more complex. To keep up with the pace of change, IT teams must either increase headcount or find ways to be more efficient at network management. That’s where network automation can help.

Network automation tools enable IT teams to automate certain essential but routine tasks like changing and testing infrastructure configuration, maintaining compliance, and verifying the status of network systems. By automating highly repetitive processes, network automation enables your IT team to save time and money while enhancing the reliability and security of your network.

Restorepoint, a solution from ScienceLogic, provides script-free network automation for more than 100 network, security, and storage vendors. Offering centralized and secure backup and recovery, always-on auditing, and one-click recovery, Restorepoint makes configuration changes and upgrades easier and less costly while putting repeatable processes on autopilot.

The challenges of managing network configuration

When network management is handled manually, IT teams typically rely on scripting for making backups and performing change management across a number of network devices, this is prone for lots of manual errors and cross scripting attacks. In addition, a number of engineers rely on multiple vendor solutions to accomplish these tasks. The complexity of manual processes across many people and vendors increases risk of downtime and exposure to security threats.

Too many engineers involved 
When you have lots of equipment from a variety of vendors, your network is likely managed by multiple team members across various groups. This creates risk, as even the most seasoned network engineer will have difficulty recalling everything that must be scripted to ensure accurate backups for every network device.

Difficult testing processes 
Scripts make it challenging to test backup and restore procedures without a separate test setup. That means the first test of your restore capabilities may be after an actual outage.

Manual human error 
Network configuration typically uses text-based formats that are prone to human error. A misplaced comma or line break may cause a backup to fail or to restore with an incorrect setup.

Error handling challenges 
With script-based solutions, network engineers are responsible for manually writing error handling scripts, increasing the odds that these tasks may not be performed accurately or done at all. Even when error handling functions are set, many errors may need to be dealt with manually.

Evolving requirements 
When writing scripts, network managers must accommodate and respond to changes in network devices that require additional support, as well as changes in backup techniques that occur when manufacturers deprecate methods.

Unsecured backup storage 
Many organizations put network backups on a network share or on a generic file storage solution, making it difficult to control access.

Expanding backup volumes 
Script-based backups aren’t smart enough to automatically save space. As IT teams typically keep many months’ worth of backups, the cost and usage of backup storage can add up fast.

Network automation with Restorepoint

Restorepoint offers a way to handle backup and configuration management centrally and intelligently. As a multi-vendor network backup configuration management solution, Restorepoint allows your IT teams to automatically perform backups across your entire network without manual scripts. Teams can also monitor for changes and provide assurance of compliance status to other teams. With the ability to deploy in less than an hour, Restorepoint helps your organization to lower exposure to unforeseen risks related to security, compliance, and availability.

With Restorepoint, your network managers can:

• Simplify configuration management. To minimize the complexity of managing network device configuration, backup, and recovery, Restorepoint lets you centrally automate manual, error-prone, and often overlooked processes to avoid outages, loss of productivity, and adverse impact to your bottom line.
• Augment configuration monitoring. To uncover configuration changes made maliciously or in error, Restorepoint monitors configurations at the point of change, automatically assessing configurations against policies, standardized templates, and known good baselines. Your teams can create policies and apply them across your IT environment, verifying configurations each time a network device is backed up.
• Streamline compliance auditing and reporting. Restorepoint’s built-in compliance engine simplifies compliance audits and identifies policy violations. With a complete paper trail of changes made through the platform, Restorepoint delivers continuous visibility of your network’s compliance status.

The benefits of network automation with Restorepoint

By automating repeatable processes and providing centralized visibility and control of multi-vendor network devices, Restorepoint delivers significant benefits for your network and IT team.

• Greater accuracy. Network automation eliminates the error-prone tasks of network maintenance in multi-vendor environments.
• Faster resolution. Solving issues and debugging is much easier when you have a centralized view of your network and access to reports on automated processes.
• Easier deployments. After the initial upfront investment in establishing network automation processes, subsequent changes in configuration deployments are quick and simple.
• Enhanced compliance. Network automation puts an end to the manual tasks related to regulatory compliance, such as performing frequent checks of every device’s configuration.
• Improved disaster recovery. Manually restoring configuration to routers, firewalls, switches, and other networking equipment requires special skills. Restorepoint performs these tasks automatically, eliminating the need to add specialized talent to your team.
• Increased availability. Restorepoint increases security and protects your organization from network outages.

Why choose ScienceLogic?

ScienceLogic is a leader in IT Operations Management (ITOM) and AIOps, providing modern IT operations with solutions that deliver actual insights to resolve problems faster and tame the complexity of distributed IT services. Our technology uses patented discovery techniques to identify everything in an IT environment and provides visibility across all technologies and vendors running anywhere in your data centers or cloud environments.

With ScienceLogic, you can:

• See IT all in one place. ScienceLogic brings all your data together with in-depth operational support for traditional data centers, cloud-native services, and hyperscalers.
• Accelerate root cause analysis. Our platform correlates events and anomalies within a business service context, allowing your teams to cut through the noise to prioritize work and respond to issues faster.
• Automate IT workflows. The SL1 Automation Library features an extensive collection of best practice triage and remediation steps to automate routine IT workflows and processes.
• Avoid service outages. Real-time visibility lets you see how your shared infrastructure impacts business services and apps. Machine learning analytics automatically map dynamic relationships, dependencies, and behaviors.
• Scale easily. Overcome the challenges of hybrid cloud infrastructure and spiraling IT complexity with a scalable platform that handles massive velocity, variety, and volumes of data.
• Gain real-time insight. Our platform eliminates the need for teams of data scientists to manually merge, normalize, and maintain a wide variety of data. By collecting data from multiple sources and combining events, logs, configuration, performance, IT sensors, ScienceLogic delivers full insight into your overall IT health.