Cisco’s reinvention of the network is continuing to gather pace thanks to new additions to the intent-based portfolio.
Aiming to tackle the 43% of time IT spends troubleshooting, Cisco’s assurance capabilities are said to help teams to become proactive rather than reactive to issues and changing requirements.
The networking giant is launching the Cisco Network Assurance Engine, the Cisco DNA Center Assurance, and Cisco Meraki Wireless Health.
The network has never been more critical to business success,” said David Goeckeler, executive vice president, Networking and Security Business at Cisco. “We’re reinventing the network ground up to deliver a secure and intelligent platform for digital business.
“Today, we are taking another major step toward that ambitious goal with intent-based networking innovations designed to deliver contextual insights and assurance that will help transform IT from reactive to proactive.”
First up, the Network Assurance Engine, designed with continuous verification of the entire network, it aims to keep everything running smoothly.
Operating in the data centre network, the Network Assurance Engine is said to combine mathematically accurate models of the network with Cisco’s codified domain knowledge to help IT teams to pinpoint why and when the network is facing issues.
IT teams will be able to do things such as being able to predict what impact changes will have on the network, analyse the state of the network, and ensure that security policies are being applied consistently.
Cisco’s DNA Center Assurance is said to provide a 360-degree contextual view that connects the relationships of who, what, where, when, and how. It will work across wired and wireless environments in order to provide a picture of what’s going on between users and applications.
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Whilst that on its own may not sound that exciting, the real selling point is that there’s historical and predictive capabilities to help IT teams to isolate problems, travel back in time to when an issue occured – seeing a complete snapshot of the status of the network, user, device and application when the issue arose. To finish off this offering there is also the ability to fix the problem through guided remediation.
The final addition, which is coming out with a bit less of a song and dance, is Cisco Meraki Wireless Health. The company said that the service allows users to automate operations and it can quickly find anomalies, find poorly performing access points and clients, and provide insights that can acted upon in order to fix the issues.
The Cisco Network Assurance Engine is available now, initially for Cisco ACI customers. Dna Center Assurance is available now and it can be purchased via the Cisco ONE subscription offer for networking. Meraki Wireless Health is expected to be available in early 2018 and will be included in the standard subscription for Meraki Wireless Access Points.
