With the explosion in adoption and consumption of cloud services for business, it’s no surprise that cloud-based networking services are becoming increasingly mainstream. A critical element of any cloud technology is having an assurance layer to call upon when needed.

Cloud-based networking services, such as Cisco Networking Cloud technology (for Meraki and Catalyst), require a service assurance layer just as any other cloud service does. Typical cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud often rely upon and recommend third-party services for data backup and restoration in the event of a service failure – or indeed a malicious attack. Cloud-based networking is no different, and if deployed at scale, can represent a high-impacting business risk.

Governed by cloud service assurance best practices and leveraging our expertise in Cisco networking, CAE Labs has developed and innovated to deliver an integrated managed service offering called Assure. Its core purpose is to mitigate the associated business risk of investing in cloud-based networking services by achieving the best possible recovery time objective in various data loss scenarios.

Rebuilding deleted devices, networks and configuration templates requires significant manual intervention, all contribute to potential business impact resulting from a service outage. If we then consider the ramifications of such activity where multiple networks and devices are affected, along with the increased likelihood of incorrectly configuring or omitting of key parameters further extend the period of impact. These challenges are resolved with the Assure service offering.

A leading UK enterprise estimated a rebuild would take circa 90 minutes to restore each of their locations, but via the Assure managed service, this is reduced to under 1 minute per location, significantly reducing downtime and the restoration process from weeks to minutes.

As part of our growing service assurance and business resilience portfolio, the team at CAE Labs has developed a simple, yet reassuring, service that complements the Cisco Networking Cloud (CNC) platform and provides customers with peace of mind.

Our Assure service delivers on:

• Significantly reducing service restoration time to minimise operational losses – from days and weeks to hours and minutes
• Never missing an operational change – continuous protection of critical operational data, ensuring the latest recovery point is always available from an immutable backup
• Design authority governance – ongoing configuration compliance and drift checking
• Proving the Disaster Recovery process with the Business’ IT team – by providing biannual testing and tabletop exercising (a key ongoing component of this Cloud BC/DR service offering)
• Built-in preventative service outage intelligence - mitigating risk against future downtime through continuous real-time service intelligence to provide additional risk removal
• Increasing control level – removing a barrier to achieve better cyber insurance coverage and help with minimizing insurance costs
• Providing 24/7 access – Disaster Recovery expertise available for full restoration support