Gartner’s Market Information for Community Automation Platforms highlights that greater than 65% of enterprise networking actions are carried out manually, and solely a small however rising proportion of huge enterprises automate greater than half of their community actions. Delivering superior digital experiences for an enterprise entails powering a number of, disparate networking domains and/or deploying a number of options inside a single area. This ends in a number of challenges for community operators, together with:
- Cross-domain and cross-product integration end in “swivel chair” impact—context-switching between a number of administration consoles and dashboards—and require experience of particular person services to drive the required configuration.
- Current group automation instruments require scripting expertise, in addition to extra funding, to allow collaboration and governance, and assist production-grade automation towards completely different services in an enterprise setting.
Because of this, customers expertise steep studying curves, prolonged implementation instances, and in the end suboptimal and under-maintained automation adoption throughout their world infrastructure.
To handle this complexity, we introduced Cisco Workflows, a brand new set of capabilities on the coronary heart of Cisco Networking Cloud, earlier this month in June at Cisco Reside US 2024. Delivered as a cloud-hosted service, organizations can use Workflows to outline, automate, and orchestrate configuration duties inside and throughout their domains—branches and websites, campuses, information facilities, clouds—with only a few clicks utilizing a low- to no-code surroundings. Cisco Workflows helps customers concentrate on accelerating enterprise worth, improve infrastructure utilization and efficiencies, and scale back prices and time misplaced to guide errors.
Workflows presents out-of-the-box automation throughout a number of merchandise and domains, following design pointers and finest practices advisable in Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs). A strong set of low- to no-code customization choices (e.g., drag-and-drop API duties, information transformation) allow customers to simply modify and lengthen the automations for his or her particular use case. Workflows automates each cloud-hosted service APIs and on-premises community controller API endpoints. A safe cloud connectivity service hosted on-premises permits the connectivity from Workflows to the on-premises endpoints. Customers get real-time updates to trace workflows execution progress, pause execution to just accept inputs from different customers throughout the group, and overview audit logs of earlier automation runs. Workflows will likely be accessible from inside Cisco Networking Cloud’s Cross Platform Navigator, by way of single sign-on (SSO), and thru embedded hyperlinks in varied Cisco controllers.
At this time, Cisco Workflows contains the next Cisco controller adapters to run automation—Utility Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Catalyst Middle, Identification Companies Engine (ISE), Catalyst SD-WAN, Meraki, and plenty of extra. The automation hub supplies two ready-to-go pattern validated automations utilizing these adapters:
- Campus to information middle establishes a networking material, with macro- and microsegmentation, securely connecting customers in campus (Catalyst Middle and Identification Service Engine) to workloads and purposes operating in an information middle (Utility Centric Infrastructure).
- Automated hybrid department web site deployment for branches that embody a mixture of Meraki (Wi-Fi and LAN) and Catalyst infrastructure (SD-WAN for routing). The automation performs stock pre-checks, onboards gadgets throughout the Meraki and Catalyst SD-WAN, and establishes connectivity between them.
Workflows, as a low-code procedural automation functionality, supplies the fine-grained management and insights into execution stream required for the versatile implementation, debugging, and troubleshooting of cross-domain automation. Workflows resides on a platform that holds a number of certifications together with ISO 27001, ISO 27017, SOC 2 Kind 2, SOC 3, CSA, and STAR 1, underscoring our unwavering dedication to information safety and compliance. The service is designed to effortlessly scale automation throughout tens of millions of endpoints worldwide whereas guaranteeing unmatched safety and seamless integration with hybrid cloud environments.
With this development, we proceed to simplify the expertise for our clients, empowering organizations to thrive in at present’s dynamic digital panorama with confidence and ease. Prospects and companions are already going by way of beta trials with Cisco Workflows.
“As beta testers, we are beginning to explore the new cross-domain automation functionality within Cisco Workflows. We are starting to migrate some of our existing automation scripts to the Workflows system and are excited to see how these capabilities will be able to simplify tasks for our customers in the future.” —Stefan Ronge, NTS (a managed service supplier in Europe).
“We have been exploring the beta capabilities provided within Cisco Workflows and see a real potential to help automate key parts of the networking infrastructure. Our evaluation has been running on complex multi-domain infrastructures including Catalyst Center SDA and ACI.” —Ingmar Schön, EnvOcean Community Methods (a community consulting agency in Europe).
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