Minimizing IT Burden with Network Automation Tools

As your IT network becomes more complex, network automation tools can help you to manage configuration changes, routine maintenance and configuration auditing with ease. Automation tools enable your teams to use automated interfaces to configure and manage infrastructure like routers, firewalls, and switches, rather than handling these tasks manually. By automating the many repetitive tasks involved in network management and maintenance, you can save significantly on IT costs while minimizing the burden, frustration, and burnout of your IT specialists.

ScienceLogic Restorepoint provides tools for compliance-focused network automation and configuration management. With always-on auditing and one-click recovery, Restorepoint enables centralized and secure backup recovery of network and security devices.

The need for network automation tools

Many enterprise IT teams still perform backups and change management using scripts, or with multiple vendor solutions that require a team of engineers to manage. This requires a lot of manual effort and “context switching,” resulting in a collection of scripts that are likely written by many different engineers.

In addition to consuming a large amount of IT resources and increasing the risk of downtime, this manual approach presents several major challenges and risks.

• Decentralized control creates knowledge gaps. When your network is built with equipment from a variety of vendors and managed by multiple team members across different groups, it’s difficult to maintain consistency when scripting backups for an entire fleet of network devices.
• Recovery testing is challenging and error-prone. Scripts make it challenging to test backup and restore procedures without a separate test set up. However, unless you have the budget to buy a test lab that replicates all your network devices, the first real test of your manual system may be during an actual outage.
• Human error can create disasters. When managing network configuration with fragile, text-based formats, human error can result in a failed backup or incorrect setup for a restore. Yet, these errors may not be discovered until you’re in the process of restoring files after a real disaster. Script-based backup solutions also require engineers to write error handling themselves, minimizing the chances that it will be done accurately or at all.
• Backup storage is typically unsecured. If your network backups are stored on a network share or generic file storage solution, any device configurations with sensitive data may be accessed by threat actors. Role-based identity and access management (IAM) and secure encryption can help, but installing these security features becomes another manual implementation task for your network teams.
• Script-based backup consumes too much space. Some backup solutions produce large quantities of backup daily. However, script-based backup methods lack the sophistication to provide ways to save space. As a result, storage costs for your script-based backups can add up quickly.

Network automation tools from ScienceLogic

ScienceLogic’s Restorepoint is a multi-vendor configuration management solution that automatically performs network backups across an entire network without manual scripts. Restorepoint also monitors for changes and provides assurance of compliance status for teams throughout the organization.

With network automation tools on Restorepoint, you can:

• Automate configuration management: Restorepoint easily handles multi-vendor network automation for scheduled configuration backup, device configuration changes, storage, analysis, and verification for network devices. Your teams can perform changes at scale in seconds, knowing they can quickly roll back to any previous configuration when needed.
• Simplify configuration monitoring: Restorepoint makes it easy to create policies and apply them across your IT estate and to verify configurations every time a network device is backed up. Restorepoint performs automated assessment of configuration, policies, standardized templates, and known good baselines with alerting and automated remediation.
• Streamline compliance auditing and reporting: With Restorepoint, your team can view and compare any previous configuration changes based on retention requirements. Restorepoint offers simple and extendable compliance meta-policy management and auditing for continuous and point-in-time compliance status validation.

Restorepoint is available as a SaaS offering, a physical appliance for data centers, as a virtual device, or in the cloud.

The benefits of ScienceLogic network automation tools

The network automation tools in ScienceLogic’s Restorepoint offer significant benefits for network administrators.

• Reduce the risk of manual errors that impact security and availability by using standard and repeatable processes for managing every piece of equipment.
• Proactively analyze configurations for compliance failures.
• Streamline compliance with auditing and reporting features.
• Minimize the manual, undifferentiated tasks that lead to burnout and unhappy team members.
• Manage devices automatically and standardize configuration at scale, simplifying IT workflow.
• Enhance security to protect the organization from costly outages.
• Recover from configuration errors or network device failure in seconds, even when highly skilled network specialists are in short supply.
• Protect sensitive configuration data by securing configuration backups.
• Quickly detect configuration changes and baseline violations.
• Debug issues quickly with automated reporting based on a centralized view of the entire network.
• Make changes and deploy configurations more quickly after the initial automation set up.

Why ScienceLogic?

ScienceLogic is a leader in ITOM and AIOps, providing modern IT operations with actionable insights to predict and resolve problems faster. ScienceLogic simplifies ITOps by providing a single platform with infrastructure monitoring tools, AIOps technology, software for network management and automation, observability tools, and IT workflow automation solutions.

With ScienceLogic, IT teams can see broadly across clouds and on-premises infrastructure, visualizing business services with relationship mapping and automating workflows to eliminate manual tasks. Trusted by thousands of businesses and government agencies around the world, ScienceLogic has been proven for scale by the world’s largest service providers, optimized for the needs of large enterprises, and tested by the rigorous security requirements of the United States Department of Defense.