Your network team is busy. Busy with strategic projects—then bogged down trying to figure out why a user’s Teams call is choppy, or why a branch office had an issue at 2pm on a Tuesday. Sound familiar?
The good news: it doesn’t have to be that way.
Most IT teams manage their network reactively. A user calls the help desk, a ticket gets opened, and someone starts digging through logs across half a dozen disconnected tools—one for wireless, another for switching, another for WAN, then firewalls, cloud platform, SASE and more. By the time the root cause is found, the damage is done. Many times, we never find a root cause, the issue just goes away, we can’t recreate it and we simply hope it does not come back.
This model never made sense but was tolerable when networks were simpler and the apps were in one location. But today’s environments support hybrid workers, the newest technology, the oldest technology, cloud-first applications, IoT devices, and expanding security requirements—often with the same headcount as five years ago. Something has to change.
There’s a difference between a networking platform with AI features and one that was built around AI from the start. Most vendors have bolted AI onto existing products. Juniper did it differently.
Juniper’s platform, powered by Mist AI, continuously collects telemetry across your entire environment—wireless, wired, WAN, and data center—and uses it to understand what users are actually experiencing, not just whether devices are up. Instead of alerting you after something breaks, it spots patterns and resolves issues before users notice them.
The Marvis AI Assistant can answer questions in plain language, identify root causes across network domains, and automate fixes for common problems. One platform. One source of truth. No more tool-hopping.
The world is right on the edge of the major transition to “Autonomous or Self-Driving”. For the last 10 years, all the talk was about automation, and humans manually created scripts to automate configuration because the management tool was too rigid and didn’t do what you wanted. Large organizations had to automate out of survival but small/medium shops heavily relied on the built-in automations for each vendor.
Typically, anything that was considered operations or observability or related to tickets was just notes in a procedure document on some internal knowledge base. The management tools would fire 100 alerts or events and then we use the troubleshooting document to try and piece things together between all of our tools.
Now combine automated, automation (yeah, lets go with that) and the operational telemetry of Mist AI, you can see where this is going.
Automated Configuration: The network devices phone home to configure themselves out of the box, they upgrade the software themselves, the built-in configuration templates handle a lot of the day 2 configuration automation, the security tools integrate with the API to automatically update policy.
Automated Operations: The network tracks many telemetry parameters to keep track of the network infrastructure health and end-user health. Mist will sift through the 100 alerts/events and correlate them to the root cause. Then you can interact with Marvis the AI Assistant to ask “Why is the user experience bad for this user?” the get a correlated response.
Combined = Self-Driving: Junipers Self-Driving Marvis actions can be enabled to authorize the system to automatically take action on your behalf. If you are like me, this makes you roll your eyes and want to go hug my console cable. This is where I will need to get out of my own way. Here are some initial examples of nerd knobs I used to manually configure features with automation.
• WAN: if you have an ARP failure on your internet circuit/modem Marvis will try to bounce the port 3 times to try and recover then escalate to you after that.
• Wireless: Marvis can automatically upgrade software, adjust out of compliance config, tune the RF based upon client-load and interference.
• Wired: if a port gets stuck Marvis can bounce it. If a rogue DHCP server is detected, it can disable the port.
Choosing the right platform is only part of the equation. Everyone is at a different place in their lifecycle. Some have new switches but old wireless, or new wireless but old switches. Some just acquired an organization that has another manufacturer and need to figure out what to do next. Evolving Solutions can help make those decisions with you at those critical forks in the road.
Our goal is modern infrastructure that creates a better end user experience, operator experience and allows us to implement end to end segmentation.
Evolving Solutions has deep, hands-on experience deploying Juniper Mist environments across healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and the public sector. We don’t just hand you a product and walk away. We work alongside your team to design a network that fits your environment, migrate from existing platforms, and make sure your team knows how to get the most out of what you’ve invested in.
If you’re evaluating AI-native networking, interested in segmentation, planning a migration, or just tired of managing five tools to answer one question—let’s talk. We’ll help you build a network that works for your business, not the other way around.
Matt Erickson is a Senior Solution Architect in the Networking Practice at Evolving Solutions, where he has been supporting clients since joining the firm in 2021. He brings deep experience designing and implementing secure, reliable networking solutions that support modern, hybrid environments, partnering closely with clients to translate requirements into practical architectures that deliver consistent results.
