A network team at an enterprise scheduled a routine maintenance window to update firewall configurations. The modifications were simple and consisted of adding a few access rules to accommodate the use of a newly deployed application. All appeared correct upon review, so the team deployed the configuration to production.
Within minutes, without warning, multiple internal services became unreachable, employees had difficulty connecting, and mission-critical applications slowed down across several offices.
The team investigated the source of the problem and quickly discovered that one accidental rule had been placed into a position where it denied legitimate traffic between two separate network segments.
This article will explore why network misconfigurations remain a top operational risk for organizations today and how automated validation helps organizations identify and eliminate network misconfiguration risks.
Finally, we will be exploring why the trend to include validation into the network automation strategy for many organizations is continuing to increase in network validation.
Why network misconfigurations remain a major risk?
With the rapid increase in the number of devices and types of devices on a typical enterprise network, it is becoming increasingly difficult for network engineers to manage all of the configuration aspects of their organization’s network.
Configuration management includes monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting of the configuration on every piece of hardware in a network, as per Netpicker.
Even the most experienced network engineers can make mistakes.
Errors caused by misconfigured network devices can include:
- Network outages disrupting mission-critical services.
- Network vulnerabilities exposing sensitive data.
- Application performance bottlenecks impeding apps.
- Failed deployments during infrastructure updates.
Sometimes, these errors are the result of manual validation processes failing to keep up with the pace or volume of work being performed by most network engineering teams in network validation.
What actually is automated network validation?
The concept of automated network validation revolves around the use of softwarebased tools to provide a means for automatic verification of a network’s configuration, policy, and connectivity.
Automated validation solutions do not rely exclusively on manual verifications but rather use the current state of a network to compare against expected results and a predefined set of rules.
Automated validation solutions can also simulate the expected changes to the network due to configuration changes as per Netpicker.
The automated validation solutions evaluated many areas of the overall operation of a network, including:
- Device Configuration Accuracy
- Security/Operational Policy Compliance
- Application/Service Connectivity
- Routing Behavior and Traffic Paths
- Redundant/Fallback Mechanisms.
Using automated validation systems provides additional assurance that the implementation of any change to the network will not result in unintended consequences.
What is the role of automation in modern network operations?
Automation has become an essential component of the overall management of networking infrastructure, even as networks continue to grow and develop.
Network Validation provides additional benefits beyond that of automated configuration management, automated network monitoring, and automated orchestration of security.
As a result of combining these automation capabilities, we can create a very resilient and adaptable environment for our networks.
Instead of waiting until an incident occurs, organizations can now proactively identify and resolve potential issues before they impact business continuity and service delivery in network validation.
What is the business impact of preventing misconfigurations?
The financial impact of misconfiguration can be considerable because misconfiguration creates service outages that disrupt customer transactions, slow your organization’s internal processes, and hurt your organization’s reputation.
Disruptions to an organization’s ability to offer its products and/or services to customers result in lost revenue for the organization.
This is especially true for those industries that depend heavily on continuous digital access to their customers, such as retail and services.
By providing automated validation, organizations will reduce the risk of configuration- related incidents in network validation as per Netpicker.
The resulting configuration- related incident reduction provides organizations with:
- Increased service availability
- Increased application performance
- Reduced time to deploy IT infrastructure
- Reduced operational risk
- IT teams can innovate while maintaining reliable operations.
Some best practices for Implementing automated validation
To create an automated validation process successfully, you will want to establish some key best practices to follow throughout your organization.
- The first step in successful automated validation is to determine what types of systems will be communicating between one another and how that communication will be secured; this is done through the development of a defined network policy.
- Secondly, to provide an accurate representation of the organization’s entire network, organizations will maintain real-time network monitoring by creating discovery and inventory systems in network validation.
- The third step in implementing automated validation is to integrate automated validation tools with automation workflows.
- Fourth, organizations will continue to review and update their automated validation rules as they continue to build and expand their data center and as they introduce new applications.
By implementing each of these best practices, you will ensure that your automated validation solutions will always remain appropriate for your organization, now and in the future, as per Netpicker.
To conclude, with increasingly complex enterprise networks, the risk of configuration error will continue to rise. Traditional validation processes, which rely heavily on the manual review of each network device and element for conformance to standards, will not be able to keep pace with changes being implemented by organizations on their infrastructure due to changes made to it over time. To know more about network validation, contact us at Netpicker!