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While traditional network engineering and operations roles are rarely seen as glamorous, they remain a key component of any enterprise IT department. Unfortunately, too much time is wasted on network care and upkeep while more strategic, impactful, and fulfilling undertakings fall by the wayside.
Despite the vast number of available monitoring, management, troubleshooting, and automation tools available, the complexity of networks today requires constant upkeep and manual tasks. Additionally, because the network serves as the foundation for all users, IoT, and digital initiatives, meticulous planning and risk management are required before implementing changes. This often necessitates late-night and weekend maintenance windows and on-call responsibilities to meet organizational expectations. Because of this, engineers often find themselves suffering from “network maintenance burnout.”
Sound familiar?
At Nile, we understand the strategic importance of IT networking roles. We also recognize that the existing wired and wireless LAN must perform optimally for network teams to take on additional projects that provide strategic value to the organization. We believe significant changes must be made and that eliminating or simplifying time-consuming, tedious tasks with AI network automation is the only way to prevent engineering and NetOps fatigue.
Legacy networking tasks that keep you buried
If you ask a network engineer or NetOps team member what their least favorite part of their job is, you’ll probably get different answers. But for the most part, responses revolve around tasks that are important yet repetitive and labor-intensive. Examples include:
- User & device moves/adds/changes
- Wi-Fi coverage and capacity adjustments
- Quality of Service (QoS) configuration and tuning
- ACLs and security policies
- VLAN, spanning tree & network protocol tuning
- Network performance and security troubleshooting
- 24/7 network monitoring
- A continuous flow of help desk trouble tickets
Responding to these types of issues, especially during off-hours, leads to long and unpredictable work schedules. This unpredictability causes significant delays in strategic networking and architecture projects, leading to nearly 100% maintenance-centric and uninspiring roles.
Nile networking superpowers to the rescue!
The good news is that with Nile, network roles can be elevated into strategic and fulfilling jobs. The Nile Access Service is based on a next-gen architecture that eliminates network-related trouble tickets and tedious manual tasks via intuitive AI and automation tools. This gives you the time needed to use your expertise in ways that make IT engineering fun and meaningful again. Here’s how we did it.
First, the Nile Access Service architecture was built entirely in Layer 3 by design. Nile removed the need to configure Layer 2 VLANs and to struggle with spanning tree issues. You’ll never receive another call regarding a missing VLAN on a replacement switch that prevented an executive from joining that important Zoom conference. Additionally, Nile builds and maintains the network stack for you, so there is no need to worry about tuning the performance of Layer 3 network protocols or the hassle of maintaining QoS policies. All of that is handled for you.
Next, our revolutionary architecture significantly streamlines network configurations. Simply set up Layer 3 network segments, attach them to wireless SSIDs, and onboard users/devices where they are needed. We’ve also made policies easy to create, and that dynamically move with the users and devices, whether they are connected to the network via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, regardless of location. This “set it and forget it” policy creation eliminates user/device move and change tickets.
From a security standpoint, all users and devices are protected using zero trust access principles and layer 3 isolation by default, eliminating lateral movement. This also means you’re no longer burdened with maintaining complex access-control policies or managing external Network Access Control (NAC) security solutions. Because each client is isolated from every other client, there is no East-West traffic unless your policy explicitly permits it, stopping malware proliferation in its tracks. The Nile Guest Service component further isolates internal traffic from guest traffic by forwarding all guest traffic to local Nile points of presence (PoPs).
Nile’s closed-loop AI Networking tools automate most troubleshooting and tuning tasks across your wired and wireless LAN. Cognitive remediation decisions are made based on data analysis and implemented to fix problems automatically – often before you or your end users are even aware of the issue. Not only does this save you tremendous amounts of time by eliminating troubleshooting and network tuning tasks, but it also slashes the number of end-user trouble tickets that are generated.
Finally, we provide end-to-end visibility and control across your entire wired and wireless LAN through the Nile Copilot for IT Admins dashboard.
Here, you can create network policies using radically simplified wired and wireless service provisioning, security policy enforcement, and third-party tool integrations. Additionally, Copilot delivers full-stack visibility, giving you granular insights into Nile’s performance guarantee status and infrastructure, device, and application health. The days of troubleshooting application, device, and upstream service issues for hours on end are now a thing of the past.
Empowering the future of network engineering
We could go on and on about the benefits the Nile Access Service delivers. From our service-oriented and automated network discovery and wireless site survey to digital twin and automated BOM creation for new network build-outs or refreshes – we take on the network lifecycle management tasks that, simply put, you don’t want to do. This allows your organization to empower your network engineering role in ways you never thought possible.
If you want to take your network engineering and NetOps roles to new levels, we encourage you to schedule a personalized demo with us. We also offer a self-paced and online Nile Copilot demo to show you what the future of networking truly looks like.
