Intelliden today released a new version of its platform for enabling policy-based management of IP networks, aiming to further automate and simplify how carriers implement and manage complex network policies.

Intelliden’s Policy-Based Compliance Management 2.0 provides network managers with an alternative to managing IP networks on a device-by-device basis or building their own scripts to automate frequent tasks.

The platform allows IP network providers to build detailed policies covering areas like configuration and change management and network activation in a way that ensures networks meet internal operational and external regulatory and industry compliance requirements. Automating such compliance has the potential to reduce and simplify network audits and speed the remediation of configuration-related problems, said Intelliden vice president of marketing Rahul Sachdev.

“Imagine a world where any change you make to a network -- regardless of who makes it, when it’s made and how it’s made – is done in compliance with a set of policies at the network level,” said Sachdev. “If you can do that across your network, life becomes much easier for you because you have a method or intelligence for how changes are made to your network.”

Intelliden sells its platform to large enterprises and carrier customers, but the latest changes – focused on easing the management of large networks and large numbers of policies – should hold special appeal to service providers, Sachdev said. In fact, much of the new direction was influenced by Canada’s Telus, “which wanted to go one step further and add additional intelligence to the way it managed [network] policies,” Sachdev said.

The 2.0 version adds three key features: more pre-configured, out-of-the-box policies to speed policy deployment; a new parameter-driven approach to policies that reduces the total number of unique policies that need to be managed by enabling policy re-use; and improved platform performance – scaling to one million policy validations per hour – to help companies automate management of even larger IP networks.

“Every customer with a mission-critical network runs into these problems, and typically network engineers are always in catch-up mode,” Intelliden’s Sachdev said, adding that the vendor’s new platform offers “peace of mind” for companies managing truly large, dynamic, mission-critical IP networks.

That said, customers that should find the greatest benefit from further policy automation include carriers delivering business services, especially SLA-based managed services, Sachdev said, where even the slightest network problem could have a big impact.