Cisco announced assurance innovations across its intent-based networking portfolio that will help IT teams shift from reactive to proactive.

It will address the 43 percent of time IT spends troubleshooting, while making IT operations more proactive, agile and automated.

The software innovations represent significant advancements in mathematical modeling and contextual insights, accelerating Cisco’s strategy to reinvent the network for the digital era.

Cisco is introducing its second wave of intent-based networking innovation, with powerful assurance products spanning the networking portfolio.

- In the data center, the Cisco Network Assurance Engine uses continuous verification of the entire network to help keep business running as intended, even as the network changes dynamically.

- In campus and branch networks, Cisco DNA Center Assurance is delivering a new level of insight and visibility to dramatically reduce the time and money IT spends troubleshooting across wired and wireless environments.

- And, for customers with distributed IT operations, the new Cisco Meraki Wireless Health reduces mean time to remediate wireless issues with rich analytics and insights.

“The network has never been more critical to business success,” said David Goeckeler, EVP, Networking and Security Business at Cisco. “We’re reinventing the network ground up to deliver a secure and intelligent platform for digital business. Today, we are taking another major step toward that ambitious goal with intent-based networking innovations designed to deliver contextual insights and assurance that will help transform IT from reactive to proactive.”

In the data center network, Cisco is enabling always-on assurance through the Cisco Network Assurance Engine. By combining mathematically accurate models of the network with more than 30 years of codified domain knowledge, Cisco provides IT teams the ability to instantly pinpoint why and when the network is not acting as intended, then offer suggestions on how to address the issue. This comprehensive view into their network helps enable IT teams to:

- Predict the Impact of Changes: Make changes to the network faster and with more confidence, catching human configuration errors before they cause problems.

- Continuously Verify Network Behavior: Proactively eliminate network outages and vulnerabilities by continuously analyzing the state of the entire network.

- Assure Security Policy and Compliance: Reduce risk by assuring that security policies are being applied consistently across the network, and ensure policies are compliant with business requirements—every minute of every day.

With ACI and Tetration, Cisco provides the ability to translate application intent and activate those policies across the network. Now, with the Network Assurance Engine, Cisco is delivering the final element of intent-based networking – the assurance of intent.

In the campus and branch, Cisco is enabling "everything as a sensor" and aggregating intelligence from the network, application, client and things to help provide IT with full context. These capabilities will dramatically reduce the 43 percent of time that IT spends troubleshooting and improve the experience for employees and customers.

Cisco DNA Center Assurance provides a 360-degree contextual view that connects all the relationships of who, what, where, when, how. Spanning wired and wireless environments, it delivers a complete picture of what is happening between users and applications with real-time, historical and predictive capabilities. DNA Center Assurance helps IT teams address three major issues:

- Problem Isolation: Get to the root cause in minutes—not days or weeks—by isolating where exactly the issue happened.

- Problem Replication: Go back in time to when an issue occurred. IT can view a complete 360 snapshot of the status of the network, user, device and application at the exact moment the issue arose.

- Problem Resolution: Proactively fix the issue through guided remediation.

With Cisco Meraki Wireless Health, IT also gains visibility and rich analytics to troubleshoot wireless issues faster and deliver a better user experience. Cisco Meraki uses a cloud-managed IT model to automate operations, simplifying the complexity of IT. Now, Meraki Wireless Health allows IT teams to quickly identify wireless anomalies, find poorly performing access point and clients, and provide actionable insights to improve the wireless experience.

The Cisco Network Assurance Engine and Cisco DNA Center Assurance are available now.

Cisco Meraki Wireless Health is expected to be available in early 2018.