So you’re out of the office or away from your desk and you get a call from the security team: “Find this IP address on the network and quarantine it.” Or you’re in the wiring closet or on the data center floor and you’re trying to confirm which one of these switch ports to troubleshoot or configure. What do you do? Head to your desk? Wait for your laptop to fire back up? How about pull out your smart phone or tablet and get ‘er done.
That’s right. In a workforce environment where mobility makes you more competitive and yet security and operational efficiencies remain paramount, you need mobility in your network automation tasks as well – including Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM). Maybe you thought NCCM is being pushed aside by SDN? Well, it turns out the answer is no. Or at least not yet. According to Gartner, NCCM has entered the Slope of Enlightenment in its famous Hype Cycle, when the benefits of a new technology become clear to IT organizations. No news to us at Infoblox, because we never stopped innovating on NCCM and tying it forward to budding virtual network automation needs.
The new Infoblox Insight mobile app is a small example of our latest innovations. See the demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEqLGzAvdK4, but in a nutshell the Insight app is a mobile interface for Infoblox NetMRI, our NCCM product, and runs on Apple iOS and Android phones or tablets. You can use the app for switch port management, such as finding the location of devices, device ports, and attached end hosts; and then provision those switch ports, changing VLANs, disabling/enabling ports, or setting descriptions. The benefits are shorter times to provision and troubleshoot services, and remediate security vulnerabilities. You’ll also lower costs with a mobile, flexible workforce that can now carry out operations from any location.
For security, users are restricted to the same level of access as when accessing the NetMRI client through a PC. So give it a try. It’s free, although you need current maintenance on your NetMRI system. But you have that anyway, right, because you’re on the path to enlightenment.
