Forward Networks, the industry leader in network assurance and intent-based verification, and Itential announced during ONUG Spring 2021, seamless integration between the companies' two platforms to deliver closed-loop network automation. Combining the power of Forward Networks' Digital Twin with Itential's low-code network automation platform enables network operations teams to take full advantage of automated network configuration without the risk of unintended consequences from change windows.

"Network Automation is essential for managing the complex, hybrid enterprise networks that are the backbone of today's businesses, however with increased scale and speed, comes increased risk," said Nick Lippis, ONUG co-chair and co-Founder. "The integration between Itential and Forward Networks will help companies maintain their network health at scale while ensuring that changes made adhere to network policies and do not create unforeseen compliance issues. ONUG is pleased that this much-needed integration is being launched during our spring event."

Forward Enterprise helps network operations engineers avoid outages through its unique mathematical model. The platform creates a digital twin of the network (across on-premises devices, private and public cloud) enabling network operators to map all possible traffic flows, instantly troubleshoot, verify intent, predict network behavior, and reduce MTTR (mean time to resolution).

Itential simplifies and accelerates the deployment and management of multi-domain network infrastructure. The Itential Automation Platform, Itential's cloud-native, software-as-a-service offering, provides a low-code interface that seamlessly connects to any IT system, cloud, or network technology for end-to-end and closed-loop network automation and orchestration capabilities. Both platforms support major network equipment vendors and AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms.

"Our customers include public sector organizations and Fortune 100 companies in highly regulated industries including telecommunications and finance, and all of them span on-prem, virtual layers, and multi-cloud environments composed of tens of thousands of devices," said Chiara Regale, vice president of product, Forward Networks. "Networks of this size depend on automation capabilities to maintain network health and provision new mission-critical services; network verification ensures network correctness and reliability. Itential's easy-to-use platform is the only network automation solution that supports the reality of multi-environment networks. Through the Forward Networks and Itential integration, we can enable large organizations to embrace the benefits of automation and provide the assurance that everything works as promised and that the network is compliant."

Automation is becoming the dominant strategy for supporting the increasing complexity in modern networks. As organizations progress on their automation journey, building confidence and trust in the network is paramount. Itential's Automation Platform provides a low-code, drag-and-drop interface for rapid automation as well as pre-built use cases for the most common operations tasks and use cases. The Forward Networks platform enables network operations engineers to verify that the automated workflows are correct and compliant with intent policies. Integrations with change management systems such as ServiceNow and JIRA ensure common operational knowledge as well as integrating with notification and source of truth systems to support distributed and cloud environments.    

Capitalizing on these capabilities, the integration of Itential and Forward Networks enables closed-loop network automation. Network changes initiated in Itential can be validated against Forward Networks mathematical model of the network, while anomalies identified by Forward Networks can be remediated via the Itential Automation Platform.

"At Itential, we strive to make network management easier for our customers who operate global enterprise-scale networks through our low-code approach to network automation," said Chris Wade, CTO of Itential. "Itential's integration with the Forward Networks platform provides our customers with industry-leading network verification and closed-loop automation, ensuring complete visibility into their network behavior, enables them to predict how changes will impact the production environment before they are pushed live and complete end-to-end automation across physical, virtual, and multi-cloud networks."

Both Forward Networks and Itential are currently exhibiting at ONUG Spring 2021, taking place May 5-6 and participating in a joint proof of concept session, "Itential & Forward Networks: Closing the Loop on Network Automation."