In today’s competitive world, MSPs need an edge
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) face significant challenges in today’s competitive market from architecting complex multi-client, multi-vendor deployments, to protecting clients from an ever-growing number of cyber threats, to validating end-to-end solutions against aggressive timelines. Today, validation and certification processes are manual, and inherently slow, expensive, error-prone, and inefficient. What’s more, hybrid environments integrated with SaaS, multi-cloud, and software-defined services only serve to further increase complexity. Addressing these challenges requires a massive transformation in MSP processes predicated on adopting new techniques to more quickly and easily validate and certify new network solutions and services.
Introducing Criterion Networks Customer Certification Lab
To meet this need, Criterion Networks is excited to announce the all-new Customer Certification Lab (CCL), built expressly for MSPs to accelerate the design, validation and certification of new networking solutions. At its core, CCL provides automated validation and certification for multi-vendor network solutions and services. The automated test environments comprise physical labs, SD-WAN, SASE, Data Centers, Multi-Cloud, Full-Stack Observability, and SaaS applications, and through the use of automation technologies dramatically transforms the experience for MSPs. Comprehensive test suites are used to automatically validate complex solution and service designs, certify releases, and generate reports for actionable outcomes. This is critical for MSPs focusing on automation and API-first strategies, where they issue frequent releases and have multiple customers and designs to certify in multi-tenant environments.
Figure 1: NEW! Criterion Networks Customer Certification Lab
Designed for beginners and experts alike
CCL is built with beginners and experts in mind since automation skills for network services are limited. For beginners CCL provides visual representations of integrated traffic generation, interface and network impairment tools, validation and certification designs, and reports. New users will find the platform easy to use, enhanced by self-paced virtual training labs for major technologies including:
- Automation
- Programmability using Python, Ansible, Docker
- Kubernetes with microservices
- SD-WAN
- SD-Access
- Data Center
- Full-stack observability
- Security
Professional services are also available to provide assistance with Day 0 designs, Day 1 and Day 2 operational aspects, upgrade testing, regression testing, production roll-outs and developing validation scripts per customer specifications.
And for highly skilled in automation, a CLI can be accessed from within the CCL or directly from a customer’s client machine, allowing them to import their own scripts or test suites as needed. Customers can even leverage Criterion automation orchestration to control and manage test cycles themselves.
How it works – Automated Validation and Certification
Criterion CCL is a multi-tenant solution that enables each MSP to have their own dedicated tenant with an ability to design and validate solutions for customers, and manage resources according to their preferences. An instance of a pre-built solution environment can be provisioned and shared (within the team or with a customer) for collaboration or an independent instance can be provisioned for each member separately. CCL supports a wide-range of representative multi-vendor designs spanning the gamut of technologies and environments including multiple public clouds, SaaS, third-party tools, Security Service Edge (SSE), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), SD-WAN, SD-Campus, SD-Access with DNAC/ISE/AD, Full Stack Observability, and Continuous Integration (CI).
Additionally, CCL supports industry accepted standards and offers hooks for automation supporting Python, Ansible, Postman, Jenkins, Restconf, and Netconf. CCL can also be used with new automation/API scripts or for importing existing test suites into the framework to pre-validate the solutions prior to production roll-out.
After a virtual lab is created, adding automation is as simple as dragging the automation orchestrator from the widget palette. Utilizing the CCL dashboard, users can then validate APIs, (e.g. if a device API is responding to calls as expected), initiate functional testing, and end-to-end solution/service testing.
Upon completion of test execution, reports are auto-generated for further analysis. Certification is determined against customer specified criteria (e.g. % of total tests passed, category-wise breakdown of tests passed, and summary report). CCL provides a holistic approach to validation and certification from creating a virtual lab, executing automated tests and assessing results against certification criteria.
Get started today!
For MSPs to stay ahead and remain competitive, they need to adopt a new playbook built around automation. With it, MSPs are equipped to validate and certify new network topologies, test new software releases, and perform configuration and policy changes, all in a rapid and repeatable manner. And this is all possible now thanks to Criterion Network’s new Customer Certification Lab. MSPs can quickly and confidently transform operations, accelerating validation timelines while adhering to the highest quality standards. This drives greater efficiency every step of the way, leading to enhanced productivity and faster, more favorable, business outcomes for MSPs and customers alike.
To learn more, book your own private demo today!
