Intent-Based Networking Takes A Leap Forward With Assurance For The Enterprise

Today at Cisco Live Barcelona, we rolled out the next chapter of our strategy to reinvent the network for the digital era. We announced powerful new software innovations for the data center and enterprise focused squarely on assurance, ones that will enable the network to quickly identify the root cause of the toughest wired and wireless networking problems – real-time or historical – with suggested remediation to drive up productivity.

So, what is assurance? It’s the ability to have confidence that your intent is being met, that the infrastructure is performing optimally, and the ability to quickly and proactively resolve issues when they arise. Today, IT teams spend 43 percent of their time troubleshooting network issues. They are challenged with finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. There are over 100 places where things can go wrong between the user and application and, as a result, IT spends 4X more time collecting data as they do analyzing and resolving the issue.

That’s what is so exciting about these new advanced analytics capabilities—assurance delivers new levels of insight and visibility across the network—all the way to the user and their device, enabling IT to dramatically reduce the amount of time and money spent troubleshooting and be more proactive in identifying, diagnosing and even predicting issues across the network.

In June of last year, we introduced our vision for intent-based networking – a new era of networking powered by intent and informed by context. Our goal is to build a system that constantly learns, adapts and protects and our most recent innovation, DNA Center Assurance, provides IT with an unprecedented contextual view of campus and branch networks.

DNA Center Assurance operates across Cisco enterprise network systems—campus and the branch for wired and wireless, giving IT access to deep insights that help IT pinpoint the source of an issue and whether it lies within the network. This is especially important for wireless networks, which are now mission critical for many customers and are often the hardest for IT to troubleshoot. With DNA Center Assurance, wireless problems are identified proactively because Cisco enables ‘everything as a sensor’ pulling network data from over 16 unique sources, creating a complete, 360-degree picture of the network and its users, devices, applications and things at any point in time and location.

So, what does Cisco DNA Center Assurance allow IT to do?

Isolate and identify problems. Using the 360-degree contextual graph, IT administrators are able to get both the breadth and depth of end-to-end network visibility, correlated insights and associated impact of issues to drive prioritized resolution. Additionally, Cisco is the only networking vendor that has partnered with Apple to provide client view analytics from a single dashboard with WiFi Analytics for iOS.

Network time travel. With DNA Center Assurance, IT is able to go back in time up to 14 days to view full contextual network data and interrelationships, eliminating the need to replicate the issue in order to identify and resolve a problem. Additionally, using DNA Center Assurance with the new Aironet Active Sensor, allows IT to proactively troubleshoot upcoming issues based on more accurate simulation of the wireless experience for multiple types of network services and applications.

Take immediate corrective action. Through suggested remediation, even first-line IT staff with less networking experience can quickly fix complex network problems in minutes. These suggested actions in DNA Center Assurance incorporate 30 years of Cisco best practices, and moving forward, built-in telemetry and feedback from real world customer environments, will enable us to build the automated remediation models that ensure compliance to Intent.

In sum, Cisco DNA Center Assurance allows for IT to become more proactive and responsive—attacking an issue in the right place and at the right time, by taking the right action. Today, IT organizations’ operational costs are 2-3X their capital costs. DNA Center Assurance technology dramatically simplifies network operations, helping businesses save time and money.

Cisco is leading the industry with the introduction of the next phase of intent-based networking. DNA Center Assurance is already seeing great traction with customers and will have a dramatic impact on IT operations.