IBM and Pliant.io collaborate to help organizations increase efficiency and lower operational costs when using IBM’s Cloud Pak for Network Automation.
With a market value expected to reach upwards of $23 billion by 2027, network automation continues to stand as a priority for enterprises both large and small. Because these networks typically have hundreds or even thousands of devices from many different vendors requiring configuration and maintenance, when network problems occur, they typically show up as outages that impact business transactions and the ability for enterprises to conduct both internal- and external-facing operations.
As more businesses move to hybrid multicloud environments across distributed networks, network automation and intelligent orchestration solutions—fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) technology—can help enterprises reduce overhead and costs. Additionally, when employing a low-code platform that simplifies, streamlines and secures the communication between organizations’ mission-critical platforms, services and applications, businesses can have their network up and running, fast. They do this by cutting down on the complex and time-consuming processes that are required for a network to function properly.
Better together: IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation and Pliant
IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation, in collaboration with Pliant.io, helps organizations increase their efficiency, lower overall operational costs, normalize configuration and management across many vendors and ensure network stability and security. By tapping IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation with Pliant’s workflow engine and API gateway capabilities (a unified API-driven platform), enterprises can now improve service delivery speed, prevent vendor lock-in and extend and expand an organization’s integration capability—all while ensuring network remains in its desired state.
With so many diverse devices requiring configuration and maintenance across an enterprise network, when problems occur, they can result in outages that directly hinder the ability to drive business operations. But being able to quickly design workflows, test and deploy a network using automation is one way that organizations can benefit from using a network automation and AI-powered orchestration solution.
With IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation and Pliant.io, business can now do the following:
- Help deliver a closed-loop, zero-touch and multicloud service orchestration for network automation.
- Enable a simpler automation engineer experience through no-code/low-code interfaces that expedite the process for developers to build workflows, test and deploy networks.
- Expand the reach of IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation by giving automation engineers a way to quickly interface across devices, while maintaining the topology and device designs within its system of record.
- Reduce the required expertise of software developers by leveraging pre-built catalogs with code blocks samples to help to jumpstart the onboarding process
Example use case
A networking and security team in a large bank has over 200 firewalls to be installed and configured on existing cloud networks at each branch. After pre-loading the exact design and local settings into the IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation inventory database, the engineer can—with a push of a button—use the intent-based automation and workflow capabilities of Pliant to install all of the software firewalls and ensure that each firewall has the provided settings. The firewall can then be tested automatically to prove the rules have been applied and traffic is flowing according to the rules, before going into service. Finally, emails can be sent to the branch managers, informing them that the new functionality is ready to use.
Get started with IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation and Pliant.io
As the broader enterprise ecosystem moves towards network automation, organizations will continue to need solutions that enable end-to-end network management, allow for customization of automation models to support day-to-day operations and ensure teams can work efficiently and focus on more skillful tasks.
Leveraging IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation, in collaboration with Pliant.io, businesses can now utilize an out-of-the-box integration to accelerate network automation.