Secure, Powerful, Scalable Network Automation

The Capabilities You Need

Automation Library

Out of the box, BackBox contains over 3,000 automations pre-built by the BackBox Automation Team. Many of these automate tasks that solve specific problems, while others enable well-defined use cases such as Backup, OS Upgrades, Compliance, and Vulnerability Management. These out of the box automations help administrators realize value rapidly.

Any of the automations in the Automation Library can be easily customized to suit your needs, all without scripting, with the BackBox Automation Builder.

Additional automations are added to the Automation Library weekly. Unlike some other network automation tools, an upgrade is not required to take advantage of updates to the Automation Library. New automations can be manually added to the library without taking the system down or pausing automation work.

Onboarding and Device Discovery

Onboarding is often a time consuming, manual process. Especially for large enterprises and service providers who must onboard new customers while ensuring there are no conflicts across network sites.

BackBox supports both greenfield and brownfield provisioning with devices able to be added using an IP Address range, a CIDR block, or by importing a CSV of IP addresses. Once added, devices are automatically backed up and an inventory taken.

Discovery is also just “another” automation job. With the discovery automation, new devices are discovered as they’re added for automatic inclusion into BackBox.

Backup & 1-Click Restore

When it comes to disaster recovery, if you can’t trust the validity of your backup, it’s not worth much. That’s why BackBox ensures success by validating every single one of your backups with an intensive verification process – first when it’s created, and then again before restoring. Specifically, we check for the most common indications of a corrupted backup:

With just a single click, device configurations and OS’s can be restored, even restoring to bare metal to configure a replacement device. No backup solution has a faster, more reliable restore process than BackBox.

A suite of other valuable protection benefits:

• RMAs

  By collecting license keys and other metadata, rapid restores can happen straight from BackBox to bare metal as long as the new device can be reached by an IP address.

• Dynamic Metadata Collection

  Without any extra overhead, our Dynamic Inventory feature actively empowers CMDBs and other inventory systems.

• Problem Solving

  Your devices’ backups histories can be used as a powerful tool for troubleshooting, allowing you to compare changes over time, or — better yet — to prevent configuration drift by notifying administrators of changes before they become a risk to the organization.

Automated OS and Firmware Upgrades

BackBox's robust Automation Library contains rich upgrade automations, including multi-step upgrades and upgrades that are high-availability aware.

Backup automations can be chained together with update automations to backup your devices before and after any changes, ensuring that your devices can be restored with just a single click should a roll-back be necessary. Similarly, pre- and post-check automations can be chained together to automate upgrade testing as part of the overall upgrade process.

Vulnerability Management

BackBox provides a closed-loop network vulnerability assessment using dynamic inventory, a proprietary feed of threat and vulnerability information, evidence-based risk scoring, and automated remediation.

Using information from the NIST National Vulnerability Database, CISA, and elsewhere, we leverage the configuration information we know about your network devices to analyze your network for vulnerabilities, score the vulnerabilities, and then prioritize them by severity. Where other vulnerability management tools present information, only BackBox automates vulnerability remediation whether it means patching configurations temporarily or updating a device OS to implement a permanent fix.

Change Auditing

When unexpected problems in your networks arise, the first question is: What has changed? With BackBox, this question is always easy to answer because changes in your configurations have auditable histories that are easy to access, read and compare.

BackBox's built-in Compare Tool allows network admins to easily and clearly compare configuration baseline parameters, compliance expectations, or any other files.

Auto-Remediation

Our automations can query your network's devices to make sure they are running according to best practices and organizational policy, and can even remediate discrepancies, ensuring compliance.

Remediation can be auto-triggered or user-resolved, notifications being served through a variety of methods, such as email, ServiceNow or any other ITSM, integrating with and enabling your management flow.

Device Inventory

BackBox's Dynamic Inventory™ feature automates the collection of your network devices' details, gathering and organizing useful information such as device models, hostnames, specific OS versions, CPU type, total RAM, and many more–even MAC addresses and serial numbers. Customizable and flexible, BackBox makes it easy to add custom detail types and queries to include in your inventory.

• Power complex automations

  The inventory is able to be tied to regularly scheduled tasks, such as backups, and/or on its own schedule, ensuring you have a detailed picture of your network as you want, when you want it.

• Inform the rest of your stack

  You can use this inventory to populate any system that can be reached via an API, allowing for powerful external integrations. Likewise, any information accessible from the device via either CLI or API can be included in an inventory.

• Simplify lifecycle management

  Device inventory is also helpful for device lifecycle management. BackBox provides end-of-life information so that administrators can more easily plan for hardware replacements and upgrades.