Menu
|
Menu
Managing network infrastructure at scale is one thing. Knowing exactly what is running on every device, at every moment, is something else entirely. For one of the largest property and casualty insurers in the United States, the gap between those two realities had become a growing operational risk.
The company operates a mixed Cisco environment spanning both Catalyst switches and Meraki-managed devices across more than 200 office locations. Their network team of twelve engineers is responsible for roughly 500 devices organized across six Meraki organizations, with additional Catalyst infrastructure at larger sites.
Config management had been a manual process for years. Engineers exported configurations during maintenance windows and saved them to a shared drive. There was no change tracking, no automated scheduling, and no reliable way to know what had changed on a device between exports.
The consequences were predictable. When an outage struck a regional office due to a misconfigured switch, the recovery team discovered that their most recent backup was six weeks old and several revisions behind the production config. The incident took over 40 hours to fully remediate, pulling three senior engineers off their regular responsibilities for an entire week.
Beyond operational risk, the company faced quarterly compliance requirements that demanded evidence of configuration standards enforcement across all network devices. Each audit cycle consumed roughly two weeks of preparation time as engineers manually spot-checked configs against corporate baselines.
The 40-hour outage recovery was the breaking point. The VP of Infrastructure asked a straightforward question: how many of our 500+ devices have a backup less than 24 hours old? The honest answer was uncomfortable. Leadership greenlit a search for automated config management that same week.
The team deployed Boundless Safeguard across their entire environment in under two weeks. Safeguard connects directly to their Cisco Networking Cloud (Meraki) organizations and Catalyst devices, providing automated config backup on a configurable schedule.
Key capabilities that addressed their pain points included automatic config backup across all 500+ devices on a daily schedule, change detection with before-and-after diffs showing exactly what changed and when, one-click rollback to any previous config version, and continuous compliance monitoring against corporate configuration standards.
The implementation required no changes to their existing network architecture. Safeguard operates as a complementary layer on top of the Cisco platform, extending Day 2 operational capabilities without interfering with Cisco Networking Cloud management.
In their first 90 days with Safeguard, the team accumulated 4,200 config backups with zero data loss. The 15 hours per week previously spent on manual config exports and verification dropped to near-zero.
Compliance audit preparation transformed from a two-week scramble into a report generated in minutes. The team now has continuous visibility into which devices comply with corporate standards and which have drifted, eliminating the last-minute surprises that had defined previous audit cycles.
“We went from hoping our backups were current to knowing exactly what’s running on every device. The change tracking alone would have justified the investment.”
Automated config backup is not a nice-to-have for enterprise network teams. It is the foundation that every other operational process depends on. Without it, rollback is a gamble, compliance is a fire drill, and change management is guesswork.
For teams managing mixed Cisco environments at scale, the operational confidence that comes from continuous config protection pays for itself the first time an unplanned change needs to be reversed.
Safeguard and Config Bridge are available on the Cisco Networking App Marketplace and Cisco GPL.
Visit marketplace.cisco.com to see how Boundless can help your network team operate with confidence.
1207 Delaware Ave #552, Wilmington, Delaware 19806
Americas: +1 (347) 464 6510 - EMEA: +33 (0) 181 22 12 80
