Cisco Reside North America is simply across the nook, and it’s the right time to dive into the world of community automation. In case you’re seeking to streamline operations, enhance effectivity, and guarantee compliance, it is advisable to try the ability of mixing Cisco Meraki and Purple Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

On this weblog we’ll discover a number of widespread buyer use instances for Meraki and Ansible Automation Platform. We are going to present steering on easy methods to be taught extra, together with a demo. And when you’ll be at Cisco Reside San Diego, we assist you plan your agenda to be taught extra about these use instances.

Cisco Meraki and Purple Hat Ansible: higher collectively 

For companies with a number of department areas or complicated community infrastructures, managing IT infrastructure manually is a recipe for human errors and inefficiency, largely attributable to inconsistencies within the operational procedures. Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed networking, coupled with Ansible Automation Platform, affords a strong and constant resolution to boost your IT operations.

Let’s discover among the high Meraki use instances that shall 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 1000’s of recent websites, retail shops, distant workplaces, or perhaps a single website. Historically, this course of would contain hours of guide configuration for every location, rising the danger of errors and inconsistencies. Every website may require constant configurations for firewalls, switches, and Wi-Fi entry factors, all of which should align with safety insurance policies. Handbook provisioning is just not solely time consuming but in addition susceptible to human error, probably resulting in safety vulnerabilities or community outages.

With Meraki and Ansible Automation Platform, website enlargement turns into a streamlined, automated course of. Ansible Automation Platform lets you 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 all your gadgets. This implies you’ll be able to 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 methods 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 particularly useful for firms with a lot of geographically distributed areas, 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 areas can shortly grow to be complicated. Sustaining consistency and making certain compliance with inner insurance policies and exterior rules is crucial. That is the place automating audit and compliance checks with Ansible Automation Platform turns into invaluable.

Ansible Automation Platform lets you leverage the Meraki API utilizing Ansible Automation Platform to match a company’s settings and standing towards a set of greatest practices and thresholds – uncovering configurations that needs to be modified.

This contains basic checks, in addition to Wi-Fi and change compliance checks.

3. Configuration drift audit: preserve 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’ll be able to set up a “good community” baseline—your supply of fact. Then, Ansible Automation Platform compares your reside community configurations to this baseline and identifies any deviations, particularly in crucial areas like firewall insurance policies. You resolve if you need Ansible Automation Platform to robotically appropriate 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’ll be able to be certain that your Cisco Meraki community operates reliably, securely, and in compliance along with your group’s requirements. This proactive strategy enormously reduces threat and streamlines community operations.

4. Scheduled rotation of Wi-Fi pre-shared keys: improve safety

Recurrently updating Wi-Fi pre-shared keys (PSK) for visitor networks is a crucial safety greatest observe. In dynamic environments the place quite a few visitors might entry the community, static PSKs can grow to be a safety vulnerability. If a PSK is compromised, unauthorized customers can simply acquire entry. A scheduled rotation of those keys considerably reduces this threat. 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 important safety process, making certain constant and well timed updates.

Ansible Automation Platform can be utilized to generate new, robust PSKs robotically after which push these new keys to all your Meraki entry factors. This may be scheduled as a recurring process, making certain that the PSKs are rotated each month with out guide intervention. This automated course of not solely enhances safety but in addition frees up priceless IT sources.

Why This Issues: key benefits of Cisco Meraki and Purple 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 Reside North America! 

Able to see Cisco Meraki and Ansible Automation Platform in motion? Be part of us at Cisco Reside North America! Listed below are just a few periods so as to add to your agenda that showcase the ability 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 

• Verify Cisco Reside U.S. Catalog, a number of instances accessible
  • Speaker: Demond Inexperienced, Specialist Options Architect, Purple Hat

Seamless Community Provisioning: A Meraki and Ansible Lab – LABMER-1100 

• Verify Cisco Reside U.S. Catalog, a number of instances accessible
  • Speaker: Daniel Chaves, Buyer Supply Architect, Cisco

Dive deeper with Purple Hat content material

For extra in-depth info, try the sources accessible from Cisco and Purple Hat:

You can even:

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