What is Cisco DNA Center and why does your company need it?

If you want to move to a more progressive form of network management and prepare yourself for the future of automation; you need Cisco DNA Center. It’s a smart central dashboard that simplifies and automates a huge range of IT tasks. What is Cisco DNA Center and why does your company need it? We’ll explain in this two-minute read.

What is Cisco DNA Center?

Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA) Center is a software-based engineering platform that allows you to manage your network from a central hub. It is the perfect vehicle to deliver Automation Enablement, which is the foundation for next-generation networking. Automation enablement is based on intent-based networking. A company defines a business intent, for example, such as encrypting data as it moves from the user device to the server. An intelligent network integrates with IBN policies and makes changes automatically, making manual configuration of connections obsolete. And that makes it highly desirable for future-proofing your infrastructure.

What does Cisco DNA Center do?

The Cisco DNA Center lets you do a lot of IT tasks. Some of the more critical ones include configuring and provisioning network devices, updating & deploying software images and automatically improving network performance with machine learning and AI. But it also enables teams to view and make decisions based on granular data on each device. Combine that with doing routine maintenance and troubleshooting, skipping lab issue re-creation, and benefitting from preferred performance curve updates and you can see why it’s powerful. And all this is from a single dashboard with a simple UI. It’s well supported by Cisco too. They state, “Through our Cisco DNA Center Advise and Implement Service, we’ll provide planning, software implementation, customization, and integration, as well as testing support. We also deliver a thorough knowledge transfer so you can continue to operate DNA Center with ease.” It’s part of their commitment to helping businesses move towards IBN infrastructures.

Why do you need it?

It’s the future. IBN is the direction all network admin is going in. According to Upshot, today’s network managers can leverage rule-based tools that use tags, AI, and automated scripts to configure and secure their infrastructure. Manual provisioning is no longer the best way to do things.

Moving to Cisco DNA Center also allows you to:

• Improve your reputation with more constituent uptime.
• Gain greater visibility on the full network ecosystem.
• Be more proactive in your management.
• Track and manage your user experience for YoY improvements.
• Automate a range of repetitive or high-volume tasks.
• Ensure the highest levels of security and encryption are deployed at all times.
• Reduce IT support tickets overall.
• Create labour efficiencies through ML and AI processes for cost savings.
• Retain team members and benefit from reduced connection-related frustration.

If you’d like to see what Cisco DNA Center could do for your environment, our helpful team of implementation expertsare standing by. We’ll help you usher in a new age of IBN and automation-enablement through smart network management tools in the Cisco DNA Center suite.