Network & Security Automation: When the Lego blocks don’t fit
Who doesn’t love playing with Lego blocks? Colorful blocks of different shapes and sizes, all fitting so nicely together thanks to “the system”.
In the network and security world, vendors are now touting new automation capabilities. APIs of various kinds, SDKs and tools. Each of them, built by the vendor, for the vendor’s products. Cisco, Juniper, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, F5 and many others are doing this. This is a fantastic advancement that will greatly help run infrastructure in large enterprises.
The catch? Each vendor is providing their own Lego blocks and they don’t fit with one another:
- Some vendors choose to use REST APIs, some use SOAP, and some invent their own protocols.
- The APIs don’t support the same features across the products, so it’s impossible to have one use case implemented in APIs across all of them.
- Users are expected to learn Python, or some other scripting language, to be able to glue it all together.
On top of all of this, users don’t have time to play with Lego at work. They need to get projects off the ground, support the business and focus on their top priorities.
That’s where Indeni comes into the picture. We’ve built a single platform that has one, consistent, interface facing the user – our UI, our API and our integrations (like the one we have with ServiceNow). Below this platform, we interact with the APIs that each of the vendors expose. We deal with these blocks that don’t fit well together, so you don’t have to. It can be hard work at times, as APIs change, and many functions are not even exposed through an API (but rather SSH commands). For identifying and understanding these device-specific nuances we rely on our global community of experts, working together to make the vision of a smooth and agile network and security infrastructure a reality.
Every firewall, load balancer and other supported security device looks the same through the Indeni UI – making your life of managing these devices whole lot easier.
The result? Automation is more accessible for enterprise network and security engineers, giving you more time to focus on policy or other architecture or process improvements to propel your business forward. I can’t wait to see what you build.