How automation is changing enterprise network management

Talent onscreen: Jay Williams, Senior Manager, Intelligent Operations

Networks are the backbone of every organisation, and when faults occur in production, time is critical.

Introducing Paradigm, an innovative breakthrough from Optus, that transforms the onboarding and management of network infrastructure with the power to onboard devices significantly faster than traditional manual processes and remediate issues autonomously.

Paradigm is designed for scalability, engineered for resilience, and driven by orchestration to demonstrate Paradigm’s ability to solve some of today's most complex network challenges with accuracy and speed – we consider two scenarios, both real, both transformative.

Onboarding network devices can be challenging, especially at scale. It can take a lot of time and people. We've been tasked by an Australian Financial Services customer to migrate their Meraki network of more than 1400 devices over to Optus management systems, and it had to be done in a single weekend.

We began by using Paradigm to discover the existing estate using the Meraki API paradigm, then reconfigured the Meraki devices to the Optus standards, including some bespoke customer requirements, we then onboarded the devices into our service now platform and conducted an automated configuration compliance audit to complete the transition.

This whole process would normally involve days of manual configuration and auditing, well over 300 hours of work with paradigm, we had it fully automated, orchestrated and done in approximately 90 minutes.

To do something like this manually, you could potentially complete five devices in an hour.

With Paradigm, we can complete over 1000 devices in the same amount of time. That's a significant efficiency gain. With full configuration and security compliance with zero human errors. In summary, paradigm has provided seamless transitions, dramatically reduced business impact and significantly reduced costs, all the while maintaining integrity and scale.

Networks are the backbone of every organisation, and when faults occur in production, time is critical. Traditionally, it comes down to teams detecting issues, logging tickets, troubleshooting and then a manual restoration. This can easily take more than half an hour. Paradigm disrupts that model.

The example involved an Australian Financial Services customer with a VPN connection issue. When the primary endpoint failed, they didn't have an automatic failover mechanism, so their branches were unable to access critical applications. But paradigm was already on the case.

Optus developed a bespoke monitoring feature within paradigm that meant it was proactively monitoring every branch every minute of the day, not only did paradigm know that there was an issue, it was already mitigating the impact. Paradigm had autonomously reconfigured the impacted branch devices to reroute traffic through to a secondary endpoint.

Once the issue was resolved, it flipped them back onto their preferred primary connection. If you compare incident restoration times a traditional approach, in this scenario, might restore connectivity within 30 minutes.

With Paradigm, we can bring sites back online within minutes. This is a shift from firefighting to foresight, providing always on, access to critical applications and a seamless experience for staff and customers.

For Optus customers, the benefits are significant, fewer service desk calls, less downtime, lower mean time to restore, and autonomous network restoration that monitors and can act before the team even knows there's a problem.

Paradigm is making a real difference for our customers and for our own teams. This is a game changer.