Solving infrastructure sprawl.
As businesses grow, especially in cases of mergers and acquisitions, their network operations extend with new resources added continuously. Integrating new locations, teams, and projects seems faster and cheaper by leaving their network environments intact.
Such a “glued on”, highly heterogeneous network configuration is known as “infrastructure sprawl,” and exposes the entirety of the network to various vulnerabilities.
The exponential rise in global connectivity has left no business untouched by the challenges in network management, particularly in the critical pillars of any network: DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management. (Often called ‘DDI’, or ‘IP Infrastructure management.’)
When connectivity is a commodity, visibility becomes a premium. Business growth, especially when the capex cost for integrating newly acquired networks offers little or no visible ROI, can create highly heterogeneous network environments known as infrastructure sprawl.
Stopping the sprawl.
Our customer, an education technology enterprise growing through mergers and acquisitions to span the globe with operations in 38+ countries, found infrastructure sprawl blocking their future growth and threatening everyday business operations. These issues, stemming from unchecked network growth, plague many globally connected enterprises today.
Amid distributed global operations, growing product portfolios, and an increasing number of cloud solutions offering a range of advantages, more and more businesses find their network environments set for change to lower costs and achieve better efficiency. Infrastructure sprawl, particularly if left unchecked for long, becomes a serious obstacle for change.
To achieve digital transformation and stop infrastructure sprawl, businesses require top-to-bottom visibility and DevOps-aligned tools that can facilitate best practices such as automation.
Solving infrastructure sprawl in practice.
Our customer hosted their IP infrastructure scattered across global locations and services. Resources resided in a list of plaforms ranging from Akamai Fast DNS to Microsoft DNS, from on-prem infrastructure to AWS, and many others.
The most important features they found in Micetro by Men&Mice were:
• Ability to view every part of their network from a single dashboard;
• Allow DevOps teams to manage resources on various servers using their existing corporate Active Directory accounts through Micetro;
• Migrate and consolidate network services at will, on any platform that offered the best performance and cost efficiency;
• Delegate access to teams through granular, role-based user controls;
• API to simplify processes and cut costs wasted in underutilizing platforms, handling network downtime, and onboarding new employees.
With Micetro, the customer was able to gain operational and management transparency. The non-disruptive deployment allowed the ability to highlight operational bottle- necks and utilization inefficiencies, without expensive restructuring of existing infrastructure. The built-in API enabled development of unified automation and increased cooperation that led to streamlined and faster network operations regardless of environment or location.
Deploying Micetro.
The customer was able to gain critical visibility to investigate infrastructure sprawl quickly, with Micetro’s unified dashboard that displayed all resources in one place.
The architecture of Micetro is designed to non-destructively deploy on top of any network environment. It unobtrusively pulls data from critical components, and integrates intuitively with existing infrastructure be it on-prem, in the cloud, or in multiple clouds.
Network DevOps best practices.
Micetro significantly changed the way the customer is able to see and manage networks. It is designed to create homogenity in networks and treat all resources as equal under a unified UI. That overlay philosophy is mirrored for network DevOps in the fully-featured, unified API.
Born of distributed locations and legacy networks, their scattered homegrown patches were replaced by an up-to-date, centralized automation framework. Micetro’s built-in health checks and automated tools like network discovery scans integrated on the system level created additional safety, eliminating the likelihood of overlaps and collisions caused by human error.
During one of the initial meetings, their network architects and engineers were enamored by being able to control their diverse set of resources through this single framework.
Future-ready IP infrastructure management.
Micetro’s advanced UI and sophisticated API offered options for the customer to balance network resources. Previously vendor-locked platforms were opened up for migration and failover, significantly enhancing efficiency and security while lowering costs.
In an IT world becoming progressively more software-defined, the customer was pleased to see that their virtually unlimited flexibility enable their network teams to keep the pace with the ever-changing demands of business.
Cutting costs previously eaten by lengthy onboarding and time wasted navigating platforms individually, our customer could optimize and re-deploy resources for better agility to ensure network uptime.
They increased their service levels, improved their network security, and ensured better overall uptime of their critical network resources.
Looking at future growth, they became confident to handle integration of new resources, onboarding of new employees, and supporting overall business objectives smoothly with Micetro by Men&Mice.
