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Revitalize Branch Operations with Anuta ATOM Network Automation. Check out the branch use cases supported by the ATOM platform
Thousands of branches! Zillions of complications!
Yes, for any large enterprise that sprawls across a wide landscape, every branch comes with the daunting task of configuring and maintaining an overwhelming set of edge and core devices.
Wouldn’t it be great to automate the entire process?
Would it not make day-to-day struggles easier if onboarding devices, troubleshooting, and even OS upgrades could be effortlessly automated?
Without glitches? Without downtime? Without the need to look over your shoulder all the time?
Because when that happens, something else comes along:
- Faster onboarding– Branches get operational at the snap of a finger
- Time-to-revenue gets accelerated at an incredible level
- Unnecessary travel to remote branch offices gets skipped
- Overall customer experience shoots up in retail branches
- All this brings an inimitable competitive advantage – that is hard to match up to and hard to catch up to for your rivals
Thanks to automated branch deployments and management!
With ATOM’s strengths of ZTP as well as capabilities of monitoring and orchestrating legacy and modern infrastructure, the benefits keep rolling:
Plug and Play: Tedious installation and configuration work for every branch gets immediately wiped away when you tap networking at scale. It’s time to go from zero to full configuration with ATOM and experience a new feeling of ease, speed, and customer-readiness.
How? ATOM platform helps network administrators with the following branch use cases.
Deploying Zero-touch provisioning empowers network administrators with a burst of never-before possibilities
- They can set up pre-configured device profiles
- They can have a new, swift, and wrinkle-free approach to device configuration, network policy, software update instructions, and other procedures.
- They can quickly reboot the device after provisioning – and with unbelievable accuracy and pace
- Also, profiles can be automatically bounced to a network device on contact with the NMS –without any need for an administrator to sit around
- Remote sites and teleworkers can be up on their feet in a matter of minutes- say bye-bye to unwieldy parts like on-site configuration or remote assistance
- WAN scalability goes northwards
- Cost of deployment moves south and keeps going down
In short, when seen pound-to-pound against a standard local controller, ZTP ushers in the supreme advantages of – simple deployment, minimal operational cost and a big attack on provisioning errors.
That’s not it!
ATOM injects extraordinary levels of continuous Troubleshooting and Configuration
- Once the device and services get configured, ATOM does not sit back and relax. It does the converse. It jumps into action. It continuously monitors them for configuration drifts and compliance issues
- Troubleshooting configuration issues or remediating compliance policies gets a radical state of ease and speed with ATOM
- Just a few clicks on ATOM GUI, and you can push corrective commands on the devices
- Not just that- any service or device configuration that can pop at a later point in time is also taken care of by the ATOM platform – with the same agility and accuracy
- Service models and workflows in ATOM platform get instantly modified whenever needed
- Self-service and scalability needs for branch operators – possible and remarkable! For example, you can upgrade bandwidth for guests, apply some restrictive ACLs to conserve bandwidth, add additional firewall capacity on-demand – and without waiting for ticket approvals. The elasticity and scalability of ATOM are compelling factors to note here.
- Any modification triggers the ATOM to send appropriate commands and configurations to all the selected devices – it’s not just fast, it’s fluid and always well-nailed
ATOM pours in the strength to monitor and orchestrate it all – Modern, Legacy, Edge, and Core Infrastructure – everything under the sun
Let’s face it. Managing endless flocks of branch devices – both at the edge and the core – is an uphill task. One that is weighed down with the burden of managing countless configurations or CPE devices. Installing and provisioning the devices automatically cannot be a cake-walk even with SD-WAN – Here’s why
- SD-WAN provisions CPE devices only, what about the rest of the branch network?
- Switches, routers, WAN optimization, firewalls, web proxy devices get sidelined easily but are critical to provision, nonetheless
- SD-WAN can provision only modern devices but not legacy branch devices. Any network administrator knows this; legacy is hard to ignore or brush away!
- Even if you have multiple SD-WAN solutions, solving one problem creates another. With a multi SD-WAN solution, you have to configure and monitor multiple SD-WAN controllers.
ATOM arrives with a one-stroke answer to multiple issues here. It provides a single pane of glass to define and enforce policies across the entire network. It brings in network endpoints to more than 45 vendors and, thus, equips everyone for quick and easy configuration of SD-WAN enabled devices, legacy non-SD-WAN devices, edge devices or core devices. It can also configure multiple SD-WAN controllers. It is the much-needed answer – a uniform policy across all your modern and legacy devices.
What’s more?
Comprehensive: ATOM has access to the entire network. One instance of ATOM can monitor thousands of devices
Wall-to-Wall: SD-WAN can consolidate only those devices that the controller has access to (modern and vendor-specific CPEs), but ATOM! It can monitor your entire network
Intensive: ATOM can collect analytical information from streaming telemetry, SNMP, SNMP trap, and Syslog at millisecond intervals. It can normalize and store in a TSDB and present it all using Grafana and ATOM dashboard. It can help you identify, get alerted and auto-remediate compliance violations from any devices – and across all branches.
ATOM arms enterprise on software image management and OS upgrade
Don’t we know the nightmare – up, close, and first-hand? How complicated and unsure the task of upgrading the OS on devices can be! Every device and vendor puts down best practices. Every organization has to follow a particular procedure to minimize business and operational risks. Plus, there are loads of pre-checks – to make sure the router is in an upgradeable condition, to follow approval sequences from network architect/security team, to upgrade and run post-checks, to make really-really sure that nothing breaks. Then, there is that added and hefty process of monitoring every device for image compliance – then upgrading it with appropriate workflow. A tiny error in the procedure could be consequential and expensive. It can shut down the branch for days.
This is where ATOM is the ultimate savior and soldier:
- It not only makes it easy for network administrators to identify OS non-compliance but also enables them to upgrade the device to the latest or most stable OS image
- Workflow automation in the ATOM platform is a simple drag-drop flow
- ATOM workflow automation has extensible APIs to connect to ticketing/billing and ITSM solution like ServiceNow, BMC remedy or Jira
- Integration with existing scripts on Ansible, Chef or Python is swift and straightforward
- Bolstered with a visual representation of the method of procedure; you can quickly sniff out and troubleshoot failures during any upgrade
- You can even automatically rollback on any failure while keeping your network and device consistent
ATOM lets you fix issues, but without brakes or jams. It lets you quickly get started and keeps you going! It makes you truly look ahead – towards the road, not at the rear-view mirror.
How about a quick peek that captures the ATOM’s power?
ATOM in TCL Environment
Tata Communications (TCL) has deployed Anuta ATOM for an IZO SD-WAN project entailing 15,000 hybrid CPE devices in the first phase; with the plan to support up to 125,000 CPEs in the next two years. Tata IZO solution achieves a balance between reliable MPLS and cost-effective public Internet and reduces WAN charges by up to 30%. TCL offers IZO service for the branch, CPE and SDWAN deployments across 130 countries and 2000+ cities.
Earlier, on-boarding a new tenant required as many as 400 Complex CLIs across four different vendor platforms. The manual processes were cumbersome and left a messy trail of errors and inconsistencies. Depending on the complexity level, manual configuration of a CPE via CLI, often, took up to 60 minutes. However, with ATOM, TCL cut downtime to configure a single CPE to less than 5 minutes!
Not to forget, customer end-users are now empowered to self-administer changes (from a self-service portal) which are automatically implemented via ATOM. You see, ATOM truly redefines networks and solidifies branches!
