The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with the maxim “the only constant is change.” In networking, the only other constant is complexity. The increasing amount of interconnected services and systems coupled with the need to abstract it all into a form that’s easy to understand has pushed people to a breaking point. It’s no longer possible to reactively troubleshoot. You need to be in front of your problems, not behind them. That’s the only way to build a resilient network architecture.
Agent Opengear
How can you get there from here? Doug Wadkins from Opengear had a very fresh take for the delegates at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US. It all starts with a platform that gives you the basis for building something stable. Opengear’s Lighthouse Service Portal gives you capabilities like zero touch provisioning (ZTP), which removes human interaction from the deployment process. That means untrained users aren’t typing in the wrong IP address or making mistakes with passwords. As long as you get the right cable plugged in you’re good to go.
What happens next? Not every network is standard. Opengear can address that with AI-assisted topology analysis. You can take an unstructured network diagram and turn it into JSON. That structured code can then be used to provision devices. That means you can take what you have, no matter how disorganized, and turn it into something predictable and repeatable. You no longer need to spend hours or days untangling a spaghetti diagram to try and explain it to a remote office technician.
Secret Agent Plan
Security is always going to be complex and challenging. We keep moving past the old bastion host model and now we live in a world of constant threats and the need to keep up with them. It’s enough to tax even the most flexible of security operations teams.
Deployment and configuration through agentic AI is all well and good. But what happens when things are up and running? Does the AI retire to a server farm somewhere? With Opengear, agentic AI puts on dark sunglasses and an earwig and becomes Secret Agent AI. Agentic systems can inventory your devices and cross reference them against known firmware vulnerabilities and released CVE notifications. The way that it provides this information is not just a list of jumbled numbers. Instead, it’s an executive summary of scores and likelihood of exposure.
Every shipping Opengear device now has a trusted platform module (TPM) 2.0 chip. That means you can be assured that the device has secure boot capabilities and integrity for firmware updates. It also means that you can keep track of the devices more easily and ensure they are being deployed and used properly. And the controls don’t stop there. Opengear has a Connected Resource Gateway (CRG) that ensures your connectivity to endpoint devices is more secure than a simple console connection.
Team Agent
The last part of agentic AI that Opengear is capitalizing on is the ability to take the data collected and turn it into intelligence. Complexity has created islands or silos of data that are invisible to certain teams. Agentic AI can root out all the information and do more with it.
Opengear Smart Management Fabric takes the data from your network and unifies it in a central location. Now you can see the status of your devices, management interfaces, and even IoT sensors. Because Opengear works out-of-band you can even keep track of what’s happening if the main network goes offline. When all this data is ingested into the Connected Resource Catalog (CRC), you have a ready-made data store for AI agents to build from. It’s super easy to ensure that your newest virtual employees have access to the best information to reduce complexity for the rest of the team.
Bring IT All Together
Opengear has the track record to help you beat complexity. That was before the advances that have been made in agentic AI. Today we are seeing even more capability being built into the network through the use of algorithms. You need a reliable partner like Opengear to ensure that your agents are operating at peak performance and have the best data possible. Do yourself a favor and check out what Opengear has to offer. If nothing else it should make your life a little less complicated.
For more information about Opengear and their solutions, make sure to check out their website at https://Opengear.com. To see more of their presentation from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US, please head over to the event presentation page
