What is Closed Loop Automation?
Automation is a strategic consideration for most organizations today. It enables operational efficiency and rapid service-delivery. Organizations are also looking beyond Day-0 and have a desire to eliminate manual, and time-consuming, trouble-shooting techniques.
However, legacy automation tools tend to be open-ended and fail to ingest the required information to take remediation action.
And what happens when you
'start closing the loop'?
Automation pours in the same speed and accuracy for your networks. With orchestration the entire workflow aligns with the way a known recipe flows. Closed-Loop Automation or CLA, however, is akin to tasting the dish time and again. It helps you to smartly adjust the recipe until you reach the perfect flavor and aroma.
In short, why chop vegetables with your hand, when you can use a blender? Yes, it’s all about saving time; doing things better and more precisely.
4 Real-world use-cases of Closed-Loop Automation
1. Managed Service Providers (MSP)
Monitoring and servicing a complex network, in the context of MSPs, demands frequent configuration-changes that may result in unexpected network outages. CLA - with its robust orchestration, collection, correlation, and remediation capabilities - takes the operational pressure off the network administrators’ hands. The provisioning time also shrinks rapidly - from hours to minutes. Incident-management tools and an impressive service-assurance factor further arm you with unprecedented control and speed
2. Financial Services Enterprise
Such enterprises have business-critical workloads– factors like low-latency and high-availability are top-level imperatives here. Networks are inclined to be vulnerable, and faster resolution is a crucial SLA in such businesses. CLA - with its big data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence capabilities - distills actionable insights and injects them timely, thus, allowing for swift remediation actions. Splendid service-assurance and high-availability- roll on!
3. Application Delivery
Networks need to be digital-ready. Application deployments need to be automated in the data center. An end-to-end QoS from the data center to the edge empowers the network. There is a silently-throbbing need to also automate the configurations to network devices during the deployment of applications. CLA can act as the perfect, simple and seamless bridge between the application and the network. The application deployment relays a trigger to the CLA system – a successful configuration results in closing the loop.
4. Hybrid Cloud Deployments
As workloads are moving more and more into public cloud set-ups, so would the network. Cloud-providers are offering WAN services to connect branch offices. Branch offices connect to the cloud provider hub through the Internet, VPN or other means. Multi-vendor CPEs in a branch office pose a severe challenge and drag historically-driven manual intervention. CLA can help in automating the branch office connections. It can talk to the cloud-provider hub and use the information to provision remote-branch office CPEs. Pre-check and post-check validation lead to error-free service-provisioning. Capabilities like correlation and analytics can further bolster service-uptime.
4 powerful reasons to adopt Closed-Loop Automation
Reduced
MTTR
CLA constantly verifies and upholds your network policy. In the case of any violation, it can automatically enforce corrective actions.
Decline in
Human Errors
By automating repetitive tasks, CLA eliminates the need for manual-intervention and human errors.
Always-on Compliance management
Whether it’s HIPAA, PCI or SOX, CLA will keep your network and organization tightly-compliant. It will also pop alerts on any non-compliance
Enhanced Customer Experience
CLA ensures faster delivery of services and prompt resolution of issues without sacrificing quality – and you know what that translates into – an elevated and consistent customer experience
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Have a Doubt? Turn to these FAQs.
How is CLA different from IBN?
CLA brings you a step closer to achieving a complete IBN system. A sturdy IBN solution needs the following elements:
- Simple graphical user-interface to define business intent – declaratively and properly
- A monitoring solution that constantly collects data from network resources
- A CLA solution that verifies collected data with the desired network state and automatically resolves non-compliance
Does CLA require NetOps?
Every business requirement is unique and therefore every network has to be configured differently. It’s difficult to develop out-of-box CLA use-cases that can address the unique needs of all organizations. CLA vendors are more likely to offer some kind of a user-interface to develop CLA use-cases as per specific customer interests. To that effect, it can be expected that CLA operations will involve heavy usage of NetOps.
How mature is CLA for production deployments?
CLA has been in the automation portfolios for quite some time and it is pretty mature at this point of time. CLA needs policy definition and compliance requirements. In case of non-compliance, CLA can:
- Raise Alerts and Notifications
- Auto-remediate the issue
What is a good CLA solution pack?
Some notable features in CLA solution are:
- Intuitive GUI to easily define compliance policies and auto-remediation actions
- Horizontal scalability to provide a single source-of-truth and a single-pane-of-glass visibility for the entire network
- Open APIs and a variety of adaptors to interact with various network entities
Where can I find additional info about CLA?
Learn more on CLA and how it delivers self-healing networks here: