Author: vinay.a@gravitasin.com

In most enterprises, the accuracy of inventory (CMDB) is critical for day-2-day operations and any migration or cost optimization efforts. To achieve accuracy, enterprises spend significant money and effort through discovery solutions and data accuracy initiatives. These efforts are good for one-time activity. However, the CMDB data gets stale quickly, and enterprises find it hard to keep it accurate. It gets further complicated with the proliferation of hybrid-cloud solutions, business acquisitions, and more teams running their apps on their cloud accounts or private cloud infrastructures. We believe fixing data through discovery & manual initiatives is not enough to keep CMDB accurate. Businesses need to simplify how IT assets & config items get provisioned, configured, or deployed and update the inventory (CMDB) in real time as changes are applied. Streamlining real-time updates to CMDB is complex to implement, especially when enterprises have multiple teams with siloed processes. Such as data-center, networking, compute/storage, UC infrastructure, security, identity/access, IaaS, PaaS, databases, integration stacks, application architectures, etc. The blaZop platform solves this problem through a unique & easy-to-use solution-driven blueprint-based automation experience. It enables cloud & IT infrastructure teams to build deployable architectures and automate them through easy-to-use orchestration workflows. These orchestration workflows not only update the inventory in real-time but also integrate with any systems used by enterprise teams to manage their own IT/cloud services/resources. Ensuring the real-time update in inventory through provisioning workflows is the only way to keep CMDB inventory up to date. If you are interested to know how blaZop platform can help ?

Most SaaS companies offer multi-tenant models through various isolation practices. Some of the known ones are, Besides building SaaS products, the team has to spend time and cost building an operating ecosystem to manage each customer deployment or account setup by each isolation practice. Some of the ecosystem features are, SaaS Teams can focus on their core business and use the blaZop platform to digitize the operating ecosystem. It enables them to reduce their DevOps & engineering costs to build from scratch and reduce the cloud costs by managing each subscription lifecycle. This lifecycle model helps automate deployments, change subscription offerings, and decommission cloud resources when usage is over. The sooner SaaS teams digitize this process, the easier it becomes to operate. When the business scale, it provides a competitive advantage with significantly low operating costs. If you are interested to know how blaZop platform can help ?

The dead configuration policies in production network is a major challenge for most IT networking group and security groups.  Companies spend millions of dollars on network security to make sure malicious user or DDoS attacks on company’s resources & data. However, what they fail to address is, there is a big security risk with people who were granted access earlier due to valid business reasons but their access is not revoked once business engagement is terminated.  For example, “Partner Connectivity with Enterprise Network”.  A medium to large size enterprise/financial institution works with various partners (solution partner, product partner, implementation partner, sales/marketing partners etc.). In order for these partners to work seamlessly with enterprise/financial businesses, partners users are given secured access to enterprise network. Typically, this process requires adding/changing network ACLs across enterprise network, apart from other steps. Do you see dead-network-acls in your network? How do you know what ACLs are applied for what purpose? How to clean ACLs once partner contract is terminated? If you are interested to know how blaZop platform can help ?

As network design engineers do stellar job in designing the various network architectures (such as branch network, campus network, WAN network, DMZ network, extranet connectivity, core network, hybrid cloud integration etc.), each architecture also requires defining associated device models & each device configuration segments. The configuration segments are defined as golden-configs or features oriented config-templates.  Very soon these designs become obsolete & outdated from what is actually running in network. Largely, the possible causes are (not limited to), This issue leads to various versions of network designs running in network and yet, none of them complying to the actual designs. This cause huge-cost and deployment-issues in setting up new office or another network segment. These out-of-sync designs further cause misconfiguration, security-hazards, outages, and significant delay in implementing network services. How to keep network designs updated with what’s running in network? No, we are not talking about discovery model and spend significant amount of money & effort to learn what’s running on network. There are better ways to address it. If you are interested to know how blaZop platform can help ?

Infrastructure industry has been transforming to different operating methodology to speed up the infrastructure designs/implementation/operations processes.  Historically, there has been some transformation from PPDIOO methodology (prepare, plan, design, implementation, operate, optimize) to infrastructure DevOps. However, DevOps model is very software engineering centric and therefore infrastructure engineers don’t find it as an alternate to PPDIOO model.  So far, in most cases, DevOps in Infrastructure space has been limited to configuration management wherein infrastructure engineers have built automated configuration management systems to deploy configurations to infrastructure devices. Given, PPDIOO methodology is not 1-to-1 mapped to DevOps, infrastructure engineers still have to do following, Therefore, we need a methodology & supported system called ‘NetOps’ or ‘InfraOps’, which uses best features of PPDIOO and DevOps model and enable a new optimized methodology wherein all the steps mentioned above can be digitized and visible not only to infrastructure IT providers but also to IT clients. If you are interested to know how blaZop platform can help ?

Generally, the IT clients think that requesting IT services, specially which requires network changes, takes about 3 to 6 months to deliver. The typical process model is, All this is even true for cases when IT groups can offer some of these engagement-requests as a standard service and do not need to even go through this long back-n-forth engagement process. IT groups can offer self-service experience to IT clients for standard services and save months in lost opportunity & operational cost. For example, If you are interested to know how blaZop platform can help ?