Empower Your Business with an Innovative Sales Automation Platform for Financial Services

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okay so thank you everyone for uh for joining us this uh lunch time late morning depending on where you're based um for the ip fabric webinar on simplified automation in financial services so automation is uh as a technology itself is a driving force behind innovation for most sectors this webinar will focus very specifically on network automation and we'll make some points and offer some of our guidance and best tips based on our experience working with financial service institutions from both the global multinational scale to the local challenger banks we'll discuss industry drivers and inherent challenges to the adoption of network automation with a very specific angle on financial services the ip fabric approach here is not to reinvent the wheel with every approach to network management or to automation and it's also not to wrap every single thing you could possibly need within an onerous heavy tool we preach simplicity and we look to aid network engineers in taking their first steps in network automation or in bringing some more efficiency and repeatability to their existing well-developed automation strategies we'll quickly introduce we're going to give you an overview then of the crucial challenges being addressed and then give you an insight into the ip fabric technology including a technical demonstration we will be watching the chat window throughout in case you have any questions please feel free to put them in the chat window there and then we will pause at the end for a q a opportunity and people can let us know their questions then we'll be recording this session and it'll be available shortly afterwards for you to re-watch or to share with your colleagues so to get started my name is joe kershaw and i lead our global channel strategy this channel is made up of global system integrators specialist resellers and a network of ambassadors and automation gurus bringing a wealth of experience knowledge and technical prowess to the use and the development of our disruptive technology darren yeah my name's darren falwell i'm as it says on the slide the network automation evangelist with ipfabric i've been a network engineer for more years than i can i want to admit really working in a wide variety of sectors and roles but in recent years become more engaged in the network automation community looking for really a better way of doing the things we do first came across ipfabric as a as an awesome engineering tool but soon realized it could be used as the foundation for an automation ecosystem really and joined the team a few months ago in order to further engagement with the network engineering community great thanks darren so we're just going to dive into a brief overview of some of the challenges that we're addressing here then we'll give you an overview of the ip fabric technology before a quick demonstration so the crucial industry drivers which push financial services as forward as an industry and also challenge organizations and technical teams to deliver um are specific to financial services but also relevant elsewhere they begin with customer expectations as a customer i personally am expecting my financial services to be available anywhere i want to be able to push through a transaction whilst i'm on holiday i want to be able to move money between my accounts whilst on my laptop at work or connected in a coffee shop by my mobile this experience of jumping from device to device and interface to interface needs to be seamless for me i need to see that systems are supported there's no pop-up errors there's no issues with my authentication this seamless experience is crucial and i need to know that the bank or the insurance company or anyone that i'm working with has secure data management processes but also that these processes are transparent the second driver in the market is competition these ever increasing demands from the customers are opening up holes in the previously bulletproof reputation and service of the big banks and fintechs and challenger banks are really gobbling up this opportunity and the lack of customer loyalty is driven by this demand it's driven by the new range of services exploding onto the market but it's also driven by regulation regulation is twofold if not many more fold within financial services but some examples of that of psd2 which is opening up market competition because i can now decide at the flip of a switch i no longer want to be with this bank i want to take my services my money and all my data and transition those into another organization and the bank has no way of stopping that pci on the other hand represents a challenge for organizations because the business and the management teams see this as crucial it's almost a certification an entry into the market that has to be watched whereas an implementation level for engineers pci represents uh tick box exercise masses of manual data checks audit requirements which have to be maintained pre and post changes pre and post project it's something that's an ongoing burden for engineers the key considerations within financial services that need to be considered obviously customer expectation translates technically into customer experience the customer experience or the customer to bank relationship is based on i will give you my loyalty and my trust in return and only in return for a perfectly delivered application experience and banking experience and a trusted brand this brand and perfect delivery are absolutely linked to service continuity a service outage can have massive impact on an organization's brand with the ability of customers now to move away from their banks service outage represents a definite impact on revenue as well final consideration that we touch on here is that the financial service organizations are looking at a global footprint this is a global reach of customers this is single customers using their services globally maybe wanting to access things whilst on holiday in different destinations in strange destinations and they will not trust this brand if the service is being blocked this is also coupled with branch networks and a global organization of employees from banking employees that are accessing critical data to internal technical employees that are crucial for delivering the service the business expectations do not change and they don't really care about the amount of complexity that organizations are dealing with in their technical teams they expect a single service or self-service delivery of infrastructure so that they can spin up their applications spin down their applications access the data they require and ensure that it's completely secure we'll touch on some of the crucial challenges here before going into a lot more detail in the next slide but the transition from the traditional space of outsourced infrastructure to the understanding now that infrastructure is the platform it is the foundation for successful delivery of services and brand meaning that in housing this previously outsourced technology means that technical debt is carried with it a status quo of do we really want to switch off our trusted stable heavy on-premise solutions for something that's more innovative and disruptive this is something that needs to be managed in financial services specifically and the final point on resources this is how can you plan an infrastructure strategy be able to move between vendors be able to adopt new technologies such as private and public cloud and software-defined networking with having a without having a resource flexibility underneath it the ability to plan your resources know when you need skills be able to onboard consultants and external service providers but also be able to bring junior engineers into the network and help them to add value to the business so resources are a critical challenge as well darren do you want to take these challenges to a bit more detail and give an insight into ib fabric yeah thanks chad in order to maintain service as joe mentioned financial services organizations have traditionally tended to grow their infrastructure by addition of new environments to older ones rather than take a rip and replace approach as a result there is as as joe mentioned a significant degree of complexity in their i.t and thus technical debt almost by design for example consider an extreme case a bank may have a traditional mainframe environment but supplement that with an e-commerce platform with its multiple firewall layers switches load balancers physical server infrastructure it may have a converged server infrastructure connected to big chassis based switching platforms and that may be paired with a newer private cloud data center environment with hyper converged virtual servers and leaf spine networks you might see low latency switching infrastructures for trading floors or public cloud connectivity for development teams third-party ipsec vpn for b2b or dmz for presenting customer facing service even internal firewalls for application of security policy to meet regulatory obligations like pci um private and public one encryption and unencrypted traditional software defined multiple generations of switched and wireless campus networks etc etc the the list goes on all of this leads to interconnected pockets of network provision often from different vendors these routers switches firewalls wireless and controllers and so on may be traditional network platforms accessed over each vendor's unique cli they may be software defined or cloud managed platforms accessed over a gui and ultimately through an api presented on a controller or there may be public cloud platforms for example aws azure google oracle again provisioned and maintained through automation through scripts through apis in order to manage and maintain that complexity ipfabric uses an automated vendor agnostic discovery process to capture as much network data as it can then analyze it in order to collate that single definitive inventory of network devices and create a configuration and state database which allows it to build connectivity topology tables and maps to determine relationships between nodes at all layers across all technology features so layer two layer three routine protocols multicast quad security you name it and verify that the network as a whole meets the intent that's been expressed in its configuration and is mandated by regulation through the user interface you can then get access to all of that data that you would have had to have updated your manual spreadsheets or word documents with but it's all searchable all the diagrams automatically assembled and filtered to give you exactly the viewpoint that you need compliance check reports to verify the behavior of a network is as you expect it to be and as per your business policies and then you have past simulations and gory forensic data about the state of the technologies in uh deployed in your network to accelerate troubleshooting essentially you've ensured your network has up-to-date deep documentation at all times and then we come to the api which provides access to all of that data in the platform so the ib fabric can be used as an engine for automated network operations imagine being able to discover new devices when they're added to the network to update your monitoring platform automatically then go back to the devices and run an ansible playbook to update their configuration to allow them to be monitored you could have a user raise a ticket in remedy that triggers an ip fabric path check the results from which are automatically added back to the ticket before an analyst or engineer even see it or even creating of automatic tickets when a specific behavior of the network goes out of compliance due to a change that's had unintended consequences the possibilities are limitless but the first stage to automating network operations is to have that thorough and accurate inventory and many of the initial network projects started by network engineers concern themselves with the discovery of that inventory ipfabric can shortcut that process by carrying out that discovery and analysis for you leaving you to focus on the real value adds of automation and our community of partners and customers are working on these types of projects right now with ip fabric at the heart of the ecosystem collecting analyzing and making sense of the network so we're going to go into a quick demonstration of some of the features of ip fabric in order to show you just exactly how we can use the uh the platform in that form just bear with me just as darren's transitioning across um feel free if anything isn't completely clear during the demonstration to just ping a message through on chat and i'll answer you as best as possible but of course this demonstration is just a teaser give you an idea into some of the capabilities so you can get in touch with us afterwards and go into a lot more detail to your specific use cases thanks joe so hopefully you can now see the the demo screen and i'm just going to full screen there we go so as you can see ipfabric is a snapshot based system it records a discovered inventory topology configuration and state of the network in a point of time database the discovery process is very efficient in terms of approach and time taken and storage space used rather than port scanning everything it finds and triggering security alerts the network the system walks the network in the same way that a network engineer would if they were logging in for the first time and you can see here for the um our demo environment has 600 nod devices um in 11 minutes we were able to to discover the uh the updated state um on disk that's stored in a mere 19 meg so very efficient most customers will run those snapshots once or twice a day though there's no limit to how often you run it as long as you've got the bandwidth available and the storage space you can limit the number of concurrent sessions um into devices and you can limit the amount of bandwidth that those sessions consume so you're minimizing the impact on the network at large when those snapshots are being run now the output from that discovery process can be seen in uh the inventory tables for example you um get a full view here of the all the discovered devices in the network their location their management details uh the vendor platform family serial number code version everything you'd hoped for if we look at our site l1 for example you can see the range of different vendors extreme cisco f5 quagga checkpoint hp juniper um and so on there's a wide range there available you can also get a view of the installed modules and all the other part numbers that have serial numbers associated with them so sfps dac cables power supplies um hard disks you know all of the elements are there um and you can get to see where switches form part of a stack um in in ib fabric um stacks are treated as a single manageable device and so you can see how those are broken down in this table we also have um we maintain end of life milestones for for all of our equipment now in our demo environment at the moment we only have one device that's infected by that but again that's that's a multi-vendor um capability you can see that all of that is really useful information for your maintenance and support contracts for your your cmdb but also for your monitoring platforms and your ticketing systems and all of your network automation tooling that information will all come in handy now in these tables we also include information about interface utilization really useful for managing resource and those those questions that come up from time to time like uh i don't know um can you give me all the um ethernet interfaces that we have in our leaf switches in our data center um which are currently available for me to connect new stuff simply by filtering on that table we can see there are 242 items there listed and we can see which which ports those are because that information is there and centralized and available to us we can also pull um from the host table here the end points that are connected to those those switchboards so for example if we want to know where the server um one of the servers sits in in our data center environment type that appear addressed properly um we can see there that 1066128112 is is connected to this switchboard in this [Music] environment and that's its default gateway you know so we have all that information at our fingertips and all of this information is not only available through this web ui but we have the opportunity to export that out either to csv um or if we click through in here it can demonstrate that all of that is available through the api as well and in fact ipfabric will tell you how to retrieve that information through the api you can simply take that payload paste it into postman or um into your python scripting and be able to to retrieve that information directly now with all of this information stored centrally you can see how this could be used as a single point of automated documentation for your network particularly when you start looking at the technology tables here i'm not going to go through them all but you can see there there's some really particularly useful information in here about for example which vlans are in use in which locations we've got information about spanning tree we've got information about routing mpls multicast security quality of service all of the um the gory uh configuration information you might need but all in one place and of course um iv fabric um generates diagrams of of the environment so you're able to for example click through onto onto a site we're currently viewing the routing information here but if we enable layer 1 and layer 2 we can start to see the full topology we can also have custom views that we can retrieve back to give a tidier view and here you can see on the left hand side we have um rooting yeah we can see from the the purple color that these are layer three relationships between the routers on the right hand side we can see um we have layer two relationships running spanning trees so it's the switched environment if we zoom in on those a little further we can see more detail on that um and the uh on the routing side here for example you can see there's some extra stuff information grouped if we ungroup it the green and the and the yellow here show where we have bgp relationships and ospf relationships between our devices so we can basically customize that view to give us exactly the information that we want all in one place without having to manually draw this stuff up in visio so you can see how we can replace that traditional documentation with what we collect in ip fabric but this does go further than that the diagramming capability also supports end to end pass simulation in the network which amongst other things we can use to support security compliance validation let's say for example um that we have a site 66 alongside our head office site site 66 is a data center okay and we can just bring that up onto the diagram alongside here this data center supports a number of server vlans and a virtualized server farm hanging off there's the switching infrastructure at the end here it also has an internal firewall that basically protects all of those those vlans [Music] from basically provides um security control to all those those server vlans so we have a specific vlan 124 which sits in in this switching infrastructure that's going to be used for pci servers and so the firewall will have security control to stop non-pci clients from accessing that we have a client vlan 116 which lives up in our head office up here and that is considered um authorized to access those pci systems and we have another one let's say 119 which isn't what we can do is we can do our end-to-end path check to prove out that that is indeed the case let me uh bring that up okay so um if we take a client that sits in vlan116 this is in our pc pci client vlan our server is is sitting in this vlan 124 which is um in the data center and we can check that on the web service port that that path what that path looks like and here you go from end to end we can now see that our client in in the data center environment and you can see how it hops through the network across the mpls environment into the data center to get a path through to the to the server at the end here and you can see the firewall is passing that traffic through you've got a layer three and a layer two path there let me just turn off layer layer two just so it's clearer and you can see happy traffic passes with without any problem if i click on the firewall it shows me here that i have a forwarding both a forwarding path and that my zone matching rules allow that traffic to pass if i now go to the vlan which isn't allowed access to that server and click on submit i get the same response except my firewall has now gone red so again if i turn off the layer 2 and zoom in on this my firewall which is now red has the same forwarding rules because it still knows how to get to that destination but the zone matching rules have failed and i've got a deny here that i'm i'm hitting in in the rule set and if i check through on the detail of that i'm going to host 124 which is where those pci servers live you can see my permit statement that i've got in the middle here only allows traffic from uh 116. so you can see there really really very clearly very quickly how um ib fabric has helped us with its enter empath check do that now what we can do is we can actually save uh define that as a path check that runs every time a snapshot is created so that we're able to determine okay um if if a change has occurred in the network or whatever does that status change or is it maintained as part of the reporting you can see here at the moment i'm expecting the 119 to fail and that's ticked and saying yes that's that's exactly the right status right now but imagine we need to make raise a change all of a sudden things change things in networks change all the time right so we need to um ensure now that freedom 119 is allowed to access the pci servers perhaps we've got a new area in in the network in the head office a new team set up that need access to to that platform we can use this end-to-end path check now as um change validation pre and post change validation so we've already here we can see pre-change things are blocking the firewall for those things but let's let's raise a change let's change the configuration of the firewall and see how um the enter impact check can be used to prove that the change is completed successfully so if you bear with me here is the demo gods being with us um hopefully we should be able to to log in to the the firewall and do that very thing and as ever um the demo gods aren't smiling quite as much as i hope but let's uh see what we can do yeah here we go so i'm just going to go into the configuration mode on here and the uh thing i need to do is i need to edit the address book um here we go so i need to edit the security uh address book um on the firewall and um basically add um to the address set um called pci clients i need to add the address for the um for that vlan 119 okay so that's added added that in there um just do a quick show on that you can see now that uh 116 and 119 are now allowed i commit that change and that's now writing the configuration back to the firewall but obviously this is still showing red because as far as as fabric is concerned it hasn't retrieved any new information so what we what we do is we go to refresh the data um relating to our firewall we put the host name in here select it and click on refresh and essentially so so what's now happening is that ib fabric is has paused the snapshot um it's basically making that unavailable for people while it goes ahead and refreshes that information it will go it will log back into the firewall it will retrieve the configuration and the state it then looks thinks looks again at its relationships with the surrounding devices and recomputes it's it's immediately surrounding topology for the diagrams now obviously if we'd made a change that was further reaching um that had an impact on routing tables or on mac address tables or or um state wider in the network we'd have had to have gone away and fetched a wider scope of state uh in the rediscovery but because we're just focusing on the security rules on on the one device we can focus on on just rediscovering the uh the firewall there so while that progresses now um as i say what we're doing here we're proving out that uh from a from a change as as part of a change process this is how you be built into the uh into the the tasks that you'd do you'd have a capture of the state before the change make the change itself capture the state after the change and then as part of your um your mop up of the change process you would then execute these checks and what we can now do is we can go through to the uh the end to end path uh submit that and we can see that our firewall has now gone blue um that if we click through there um our zone matching rules are good and um that if we check on the uh host 24 which is where the server sits we can now see that 119 has been added into the list of of addresses that are allowed access to that server um and just to prove it we can try um another vlan that we haven't granted access to just to prove yes it is still failing so we haven't opened up configuration to everything um we've we've limited it to just the uh um the items in the change in vlan 119 specifically hopefully um you know we've not gone through a comprehensive demo there but we've shown just how ipfabric can address some of the inventory and compliance requirements on the network through its automated discovery and its intent verification capability um what we'll do now is we'll just pause this and we'll head back to the uh back to the presentation just bear with me okay so the the key takeaways um really that we're trying to to get to with this um are the ones that we see on the slide here and the ones that we've mentioned at the top really from an inventory perspective the inventory has to represent a source of truth and trust you've got to feed verified data into the cmdb and that creates a powerful strategic tool which underpins commercial investments maintenance contracts automation workflows and operational processing systems leaving this to be manually maintained introduces unnecessary risk and operational inefficiency with ipfabric we can automate that discovery and maintenance of the network inventory that same inventory can then be shared with other platforms and systems to ensure consistency using its api integration no more requirements and manually update multiple inventories for different purposes from a compliance perspective annual audits for regulatory compliance can cost significant time and effort building automated reporting that's updated at more regular intervals significantly improves the efficiency and extending that reporting to include company policy and configuration expectations also helps to maintain consistency and it offers peace of mind to technology and business leadership it also allows us to consider automating proactive resolution of network anomalies to deliver a predictable infrastructure and resilient services to the business also as we've seen providing the ability to validate network state before and after changes using network simulation helps ensure accuracy of the change implementation and improves the level of trust in that network change process so from an automation adoption perspective while automation is a big talking point network engineers are still really considering their approach how to gain management sign off and how to take the next steps so our thoughts are these when you're assessing your project look to see how it delivers a measurable result and aligns with business outcomes consider how it improves operational feedback or processes or reporting weigh up the best approach for the project at hand for example ib fabric can deliver all the discovery and a lot of your automated analysis requirements look to borrow scripts or codes that can extract ip fabric data and manipulate it and only when there isn't anything else available consider building the code yourself get involved in the network automation communities so you don't need to reinvent the wheel every term it gives you a source of code and scripts but also of experience expertise who may be able to help you along the path consider joining the many slack groups networks of code for example um where we have an ip fabric channel but there are thousands of users registered who are sharing ideas and having conversations about network automation daily we've listed a few useful links here and obviously um you'll have these in the uh in the notes and the slides afterwards um but we've got the the network to code slack uh channel there that we mentioned um our youtube channel there's videos there on um using apis and our automation adventures series where we're walking through using ib fabric as they the center of that automation ecosystem um my github repository there has um sample uh code and uh postman collections and those sorts of things that are of interest if you're starting down that path and we also have a trial a 30-day trial available for ipfabric for network engineers who are interested in looking into automation joe great thanks darren so what we're going to do now is we're going to wrap up but just before we do we'll open up for 90 seconds for people to put any questions they may have into the chat and then we'll review the questions before we do close up and again as i mentioned at the top we uh we will share recording of this and some details around the the content that darren pointed to at the end so if you've got any questions now please feel to feel free to type them into the chat or the q a function and uh we'll review very shortly okay we've just had uh had one question come in there so i will i'll pick that one up before we uh get any others so so uh martin asks how difficult it is to deploy um ip fabric in the environment it's a very very simple deployment it's um it ships as a as an ova single ova that you on a relatively small virtual machine um under vmware um if you if you check out the automation adventure series of videos you'll see that in in i think it was episode three where i actually do that installation and it's really really fast um i probably installs in in half an hour and the first discovery well you've already seen how quick a discovery is in the network it can you can literally within a day you can have an environment up and running and and um providing an instant investment return great thanks darren so just one more question coming here thanks for answering that one one question here is how does ib fabric actually help with compliance fairly uh straightforward question but uh do you want to take that one yeah sure yeah that's it's a really good point actually it uh um with the um intent verification capability we're able to report on um being able to to run checks against configuration and and so on and so those those reports run every time a snapshot is created and so so daily or twice daily uh and so you're able to get an uh you know automated instant um view i suppose on on how configuration in the network and how state of the network is um uh meets or doesn't the the uh the stipulations within regulations compare and contrast that with um what what used to be the case for for pci regulation where you may maybe take half of your network team off for a week to go and manually trawl through the network um collating all the information they needed to in order to meet those those audit requirements um you can see a sort of big improvement there great thanks darren so if there's no more questions guys let's uh let's wrap it up now and again we'll get the recording across to you with all the content but realistically this was just meant there's a bit of a teaser i want to get you interested feel free to reach out to us via linkedin or via email and uh i would love to set up a separate demo to do a one-to-one with your teams and go into the the nuances of your own environment and the crucial challenges that you're facing as a networking team really look forward to seeing you guys in the uh in the slack channel and getting involved in the community and hopefully we can speak to you again soon so thanks again for joining yeah thanks for your time everybody thanks darren cheers