Offering a Helping Hand Through Automation and Services

The inexorable surge of IT and cloud applications with increasing quantities and types of connected devices across sprawling network domains not only into cloud and container services but to Internet of Things (IoT) deployments and to remote and mobile workers, has led to intensifying complexity in enterprise network topologies over the last decade. Network evolution has not only challenged network managers to keep up with this blistering pace of change, it has vastly expanded the scope of responsibilities for IT and Operations personnel to maintain the reliability and operation of their increasingly complex end-to-end network and compute infrastructure.

Easing complexity through automation

One approach to managing this complexity entails automating your provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and management processes. But the very nature of complexity implies numerous, diverse application and network flows and tasks within these processes. Nevertheless, by enumerating and decomposing your network paths and application flows, you may be able to identify common sub-flows, which if automated, could reduce the management effort for each individual flow. For example, DHCP, DNS and IPAM (DDI) functions are involved in nearly every IT task or workflow, whether you are provisioning a new subnet in a cloud VPC, deploying a swarm of IP-addressable containers, publishing email policies, or adding a resource record to cloud DNS systems and services. DDI automation, whether in isolation or as a sub-flow to a broader flow, can help you reduce your overall network management complexity.

Easing complexity through managed services

Another way to ease complexity is to enlist assistance from domain experts. Staying with the DDI theme, use of DDI managed services, whether to monitor, troubleshoot, patch, or upgrade your DDI infrastructure, or even make DDI changes, can reduce the burden on your IT and cloud teams. Use of a DDI managed service can reduce the burden on your network management team, enabling you to focus on broader network initiatives.

Cygna Labs can help

Whether you’d like to automate DDI or engage DDI managed services, or both, Cygna Labs can assist! Our automation appliances enable you to create your own REST endpoints which may be invoked directly or by an IT orchestrator such as ServiceNow or Terraform. You can map each endpoint to a workflow, definable using our drag-and-drop graphical interface, to perform downstream functions like provisioning a subnet in AWS while updating your DDI source-of-truth database, discovering assigned IP addresses in Azure to reconcile with your DDI system, or assigning IP addresses to each container within a swarm.

Our DDI managed services are also available to assist with maintaining your DDI infrastructure and making DDI related moves, adds and deletes as required. Contact us to learn more about either or both of these time-saving reliable DDI management options.