A recent report found over the past three years nearly 40% of organizations suffered major infrastructure outages caused by…
Human error.
In the competitive world of business, things move fast, and competition is tough. To keep pace and stay ahead of the game, companies need to remain as efficient as possible.
One way to do this is by adopting new technologies and processes that make operations smoother and, in return, boost productivity. In recent years, zero touch provisioning has made its way to the forefront of these IT solutions. It offers a simple way to set up network devices without having your IT team manually perform the tasks.
This powerful zero touch provisioning method of automation offers many benefits—like streamlining processes, saving cash, and strengthening data security—but do you really need all it has to offer? Let’s find out. ⬇️
Typical Provisioning Issues IT Environments Face
Whether you have a virtual or physical IT infrastructure, both hold unique benefits – and challenges.
Virtual IT infrastructures offer on-demand provisioning, efficient management, and overall lower total costs. With cloud-based resources, many companies are driving deployments and management with container orchestration systems. A favorite among many users is Kubernetes—which is great, yet also complex, with seemingly endless choices for configuration and provisioning.
Should a wrong choice be made upstream by DevOps or IT people, the downstream will see dangerous impacts on performance—and depending on the severity, it could begin to spiral into other areas. 🙃
On the physical IT side, things aren’t much better. Legacy devices are still widely used. Configuring them can take quite a bit of time and skilled effort from an IT pro. And while that isn’t ideal, human error is still by far the biggest factor the physical realm faces.
85% of human errors are caused by IT staff not following proper procedures. These mistakes occur far too often and can result in downtime or decreased overall productivity.
These are a few words no business owner or operations leader ever wants to hear. 🙉
Pre-configuring resources in-house can combat some of these issues, but it doesn’t make them disappear. For example, if a member of the IT staff needs to perform manual configuration, this opens up the possibility of misconfigurations. A miss-step like this could render the device unusable when it reaches the destination. Plus, the heightened risk of shipping sensitive data isn’t necessarily the best route to consider.
You could avoid the security risk and have the equipment shipped with default factory settings. But this puts the strain on the IT team who will have to bear the burden of configuring and provisioning the devices—and with the stats we’ve looked at, it’s not an ideal situation.
It seems no matter the solution, nothing seems to work perfectly. This begs the question—Is there a way to limit or eliminate these challenges? ⬇️
Zero Touch Provisioning for the Win
With zero touch provisioning, the only manual part of the job will be to rack in the device, power it up, and get it connected to the network. Once that’s done, the job is essentially complete.
Once finished with these simple steps, the automated and error-free process takes over. Here’s a brief example of how this would work:
- The zero touch provisioning server will retrieve the device configuration file, based on its unique serial number.
- The server will then push the file to the device, which will then automatically configure itself based on the given file parameters.
- Once the device is configured properly, the server will verify the device is functioning correctly and is communicating with other devices within the network.
- The server will continue to monitor the device, ensuring the performance is satisfactory, otherwise an administrator alert will be triggered.
Zero touch provisioning can be used in a variety of network environments like data centers, branch offices, and even remote sites. By utilizing an automated process such as this one, the challenges typically faced with provisioning in the past are over. 😎
➡️ Learn more about the need for zero touch provisioning.
In order for it to be effective, the solution needs to provide a broad range of coverage to devices, systems, and other technologies. This means having automated workflows for all the most popular physical and virtual resources that make up most IT environments.
So where can you get the broad coverage and pre-built zero touch provisioning workflows to eliminate these challenges? ⬇️
The Pliant Zero Touch Provisioning Solution
Pliant’s solution is built on the Pliant Orchestration Platform, offering enterprises a streamlined approach to provisioning processes. Its powerful capabilities allow IT teams to move away from the outdated and often error-prone provisioning methods of the past.
You’ll gain a new automated, integrated, and connected provisioning solution that is:
- Error-free
- Cost saving
- Highly efficient
- Centrally managed
What this means for your IT and DevOps teams is no more manual and repetitive tasks associated with configuration or provisioning. Plus, it eliminates the frustration of having to constantly take time to check for possible errors. By reducing the need for these monotonous tasks, you free employees up to spend their valuable time in other strategic areas and focus on other important initiatives.
The underlying Pliant Orchestration Platform is powered by thousands of abstracted APIs from popular products. The result? 🤔
Users can produce automated configuration or provisioning workflows by dragging and dropping low-code “action blocks”. This allows them to quickly build exact workflows to meet specific requirements with ease. Forget the days or weeks this normally would take—now get results in just a few hours with the Pliant Solution.
Final Thoughts
In modern IT environments, downtime caused by human error during the provisioning of virtual or physical resources is an issue that we now know can be avoided. Addressing these problems with a zero touch provisioning solution like Pliant’s is more important today than ever before.
If you’re ready to start streamlining processes, saving money, and strengthening data security, take Pliant for a test drive today—completely free.
