Cisco Stay North America is simply across the nook, and it’s the right time to dive into the world of community automation. When you’re seeking to streamline operations, increase effectivity, and guarantee compliance, it’s good to try the facility of mixing Cisco Meraki and Pink Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
On this weblog we’ll discover a number of common buyer use circumstances for Meraki and Ansible Automation Platform. We are going to present steerage on how you can be taught extra, together with a demo. And when you’ll be at Cisco Stay San Diego, we show you how to plan your agenda to be taught extra about these use circumstances.
Cisco Meraki and Pink Hat Ansible: higher collectively
For companies with a number of department places or complicated community infrastructures, managing IT infrastructure manually is a recipe for human errors and inefficiency, principally on account of inconsistencies within the operational procedures. Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed networking, coupled with Ansible Automation Platform, provides a sturdy and constant resolution to boost your IT operations.
Let’s discover a few of the prime Meraki use circumstances that will likely be accessible with Ansible Automation Platform, within the type of a Validated Content material Assortment, that may simplify your operations lifecycle: department provisioning, audit and compliance checks, configuration drift audits, and common rotation of Wi-Fi pre-shared keys.
1. Department provisioning: quick, constant, and dependable
Think about deploying a whole lot or hundreds of recent websites, retail shops, distant places of work, or perhaps a single website. Historically, this course of would contain hours of guide configuration for every location, growing the danger of errors and inconsistencies. Every website would possibly require constant configurations for firewalls, switches, and Wi-Fi entry factors, all of which should align with safety insurance policies. Guide provisioning shouldn’t be solely time consuming but additionally liable to human error, probably resulting in safety vulnerabilities or community outages.
With Meraki and Ansible Automation Platform, website growth turns into a streamlined, automated course of. Ansible Automation Platform permits you to create reusable Ansible playbooks, that are automated scripts that outline the specified state of your community. These Ansible playbooks can work together with the Meraki API to carry out configurations throughout your entire gadgets. This implies you possibly can outline a template or “golden configuration” for a typical department after which apply that configuration constantly throughout all new websites.
Steps required for a department provisioning orchestrated workflow:
- Create networks and declare gadgets.
- Configure gateway (firewall) and WAN.
- Configure switches.
- Configure SSID and entry factors.
- Automate documentation and reporting to replace enterprise programs together with Sources of Reality
By utilizing Ansible Automation Platform to automate department provisioning with Cisco Meraki, organizations can obtain a extra agile, dependable, and safe community infrastructure. This strategy is very useful for firms with a lot of geographically distributed places, with operation groups that need to orchestrate a number of applied sciences, at scale, with a centralized strategy.
2. Audit and compliance verify: Keep forward of the curve
Managing configurations throughout an unlimited community with a number of places can rapidly grow to be complicated. Sustaining consistency and guaranteeing compliance with inner insurance policies and exterior laws is essential. That is the place automating audit and compliance checks with Ansible Automation Platform turns into invaluable.
Ansible Automation Platform permits you to leverage the Meraki API utilizing Ansible Automation Platform to check a corporation’s settings and standing in opposition to a set of greatest practices and thresholds – uncovering configurations that ought to be modified.
This consists of basic checks, in addition to Wi-Fi and swap compliance checks.
3. Configuration drift audit: keep a supply of fact on your firewall insurance policies
Configuration drift can result in surprising community habits and safety vulnerabilities. With Ansible Automation Platform, you possibly can set up a “good community” baseline—your supply of fact. Then, Ansible Automation Platform compares your dwell community configurations to this baseline and identifies any deviations, particularly in essential areas like firewall insurance policies. You determine if you’d like Ansible Automation Platform to mechanically right any non-compliant configurations or create a service ticket with all the small print.
By utilizing Ansible Automation Platform to take care of a supply of fact and audit for configuration drift, you possibly can be certain that your Cisco Meraki community operates reliably, securely, and in compliance along with your group’s requirements. This proactive strategy drastically reduces danger and streamlines community operations.
4. Scheduled rotation of Wi-Fi pre-shared keys: improve safety
Often updating Wi-Fi pre-shared keys (PSK) for visitor networks is a essential safety greatest observe. In dynamic environments the place quite a few visitors could entry the community, static PSKs can grow to be a safety vulnerability. If a PSK is compromised, unauthorized customers can simply achieve entry. A scheduled rotation of those keys considerably reduces this danger. Manually altering PSKs each month throughout a number of websites is a tedious and error-prone course of, however Ansible Automation Platform can automate this significant safety activity, guaranteeing constant and well timed updates.
Ansible Automation Platform can be utilized to generate new, robust PSKs mechanically after which push these new keys to your entire Meraki entry factors. This may be scheduled as a recurring activity, guaranteeing that the PSKs are rotated each month with out guide intervention. This automated course of not solely enhances safety but additionally frees up priceless IT assets.
Why This Issues: key benefits of Cisco Meraki and Pink Hat Ansible Automation Platform
By combining Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed networking with Ansible Automation Platform, organizations obtain:
- Fast deployment
- Proactive compliance
- Operational stability
- Enhanced safety
Be part of Us at Cisco Stay North America!
Able to see Cisco Meraki and Ansible Automation Platform in motion? Be part of us at Cisco Stay North America! Listed here are a couple of periods so as to add to your agenda that showcase the facility of those applied sciences:
Unite Meraki, Catalyst, and ISE with Ansible – DEVWKS-2301
- Monday, Jun 9, 2:00 PM – 2:45 PM PDT
- Audio system:
- Francois Caen, Product Supervisor, Cisco – Distinguished Speaker
- Oren Brigg, Engineering Product Supervisor, Cisco
- Craig Egan, System Engineer, Cisco
Extending automation to distant department networks (Meraki) – DEVRHL-1004
- Examine Cisco Stay U.S. Catalog, a number of occasions accessible
- Speaker: Demond Inexperienced, Specialist Options Architect, Pink Hat
Seamless Community Provisioning: A Meraki and Ansible Lab – LABMER-1100
- Examine Cisco Stay U.S. Catalog, a number of occasions accessible
- Speaker: Daniel Chaves, Buyer Supply Architect, Cisco
Dive deeper with Pink Hat content material
For extra in-depth info, try the assets accessible from Cisco and Pink Hat:
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