Digital transformation is rapidly accelerating because there are thousands of new applications, virtualized environments, and clouds. These applications can be hosted anywhere in the world. Building an enormous new data center with all network and security policies following those applications wherever they reside will be very challenging. The best approach is to build a new data center with network assurance and Cisco intent-based networking to address the new data center requirements.
Intent-based networking solutions enable conventional practices that require the alignment of manually derived individual network-element configurations to be replaced by controller-led and policy-based abstractions that easily enable you to express intent (desired outcome) and subsequently validate that the network is doing what you asked of it. Scale, agility, and security demands associated with digital transformation require that element-by-element network configuration be replaced by automated systemwide programming of network elements with consistent intent-based policies. Furthermore, the contextual analysis of data before, during, and after deployment enables continuous verification to help assure that the network is delivering the desired outcome and protection at any point in time. Continuous gathering of telemetry and other forms of data from a multitude of diverse sources provides a rich context of information to optimize a system and ensure it is secure.
The Cisco Network Assurance Engine solution provides continuous verification and analysis of the entire data center network, giving you confidence that your network is operating consistently with your intent. It combines mathematically accurate network models with codified Cisco domain knowledge to generate “smart events” that pinpoint deviations from intent and offer remediation recommendations.
Using comprehensive analysis spanning operator intent, controller policy, switch configurations, and data-plane state, the Network Assurance Engine helps you proactively detect network outages and security policy vulnerabilities before they impact business, reduces risk by predicting change impact, and rapidly determines the root cause of problems. With a unified network repository and compliance rules, the Network Assurance Engine simplifies audits and ensures compliance.
The Cisco Network Assurance Engine is the critical Intent Assurance pillar of Cisco’s vision for intent-based data center networks. Built on Cisco’s patented network verification technology, the Network Assurance Engine is a comprehensive intent-assurance solution that mathematically verifies the entire data center network for correctness. It gives you the confidence that your network is always operating consistently with your intent, even as it changes dynamically.
With the Cisco Network Assurance Engine, you can do the following:
Predict the impact of changes: Proactively verify changes for correctness to drive increased change agility while significantly reducing risk of human error–induced network failures.
Verify networkwide behavior: Continuously analyze and verify the dynamic state of the network against intent and policy to ensure connectivity and eliminate potential network outages and vulnerabilities before any business impact occurs.
Assure network security policy and compliance: Assure network security policies and check for compliance against business rules to reduce security risk and achieve provable continuous compliance by policy and state. The Cisco Network Assurance Engine achieves all of the above by reading the entire policy—every configuration, the networkwide state, and the operator’s intent—and building from these comprehensive and mathematically accurate models of network behavior. It then combines these models with Cisco’s operational domain knowledge of networking to generate smart events that instantly pinpoint any deviations from intended behavior and suggest expert-level remediation recommendations.
