A Problem That Never Became One
A DHCP service disruption usually means teams arrive the next morning to find devices that can connect to the network but can’t get online, leaving employees unable to work. But by the time anyone at Grant Thornton Advisors clocked in, the problem had already been resolved. No ticket. No help desk call. No meeting to explain what happened. Employees simply started their day without having to think about the network at all.
That’s the story Laura Lincoln, Director of Infrastructure Operations at Grant Thornton Advisors, keeps coming back to when she talks about what changed at the organization. The incident itself wasn’t dramatic. A DHCP failure is a frequent help desk ticket for any company. The dramatic change is what didn’t happen afterward. HPE Marvis minis, AI-native digital experience twins in HPE Mist, proactively simulates user connections, even when no users are on the network. HPE Marvis minis flagged the failure and showed the team what was wrong in their network, where it occurred, and when it happened. There was no widespread outage and no service desk backlog. Client work continued as always. A technical problem stayed a technical problem instead of becoming a business one.
Life Before the Fix
It wasn’t always like this. Before Grant Thornton Advisors adopted HPE Mist, engineers frequently had to manually adjust and tune network configurations. The network might be stable one day, only for problems to resurface a day or two later. Escalations came in daily, often bypassing the ticketing system entirely. Users had learned that formally reporting an issue could take longer than simply flagging it to whoever was nearby.
In some cases, when granted permission, HPE Marvis can now remediate issues entirely on its own. When switch ports connected to conference-room AV equipment get stuck, Port Stuck, an HPE Marvis self-driving action in HPE Mist, detects the problem and automatically resets the port. “We didn’t have to get a ticket on it. We didn’t have to pull in an AV team or the network team or get a user complaint that the AV rooms didn’t work because it fixed itself,” Lincoln says. Often, her team only finds out it happened from the logs.
The volume got bad enough that Lincoln started tracking complaints herself, since no other system was capturing them. When the firm signaled, it was moving to a new platform, its incumbent vendor didn’t fight for the business. They said, in effect, that they couldn’t compete with where things were headed. That made the decision to pivot to HPE Mist even easier than Lincoln expected. And after a pilot deployment, the rollout moved fast.
From Proving to Fixing
The change that mattered most wasn’t any single feature. It was a shift in where the team’s attention went. Lincoln describes the old model as manually proving what was broken — gathering evidence, tracking down users, reconstructing what happened after the fact. The network now does much of that diagnostic work itself, which means her team spends less time establishing that a problem exists and more time actually resolving it.
Deployment got simpler too. Switches now ship to sites with no pre-staging required, close enough to plug-and-play that a non-technical employee on-site can get a location connected. Firmware upgrades, once something assigned to a specific trusted person to babysit, now run on a schedule overnight without anyone managing the process. The appeal isn’t speed for its own sake. The real value is that the same task executes the same way every time, which removes a category of error that used to come from human variability.
Proving the Value of Nothing Happening
None of this is easy to put in front of a budget committee, and Lincoln is candid about that. The best outcomes in her world are invisible by design. A problem detected and resolved is, from the business’s perspective, a non-event. So the metrics she brings to leadership aren’t about features or uptime percentages. They’re about the process:
- How quickly was an issue detected?
- How quickly it was isolated?
- Was service restored before users were affected?
- Did the same failure happen again?
Those four questions have become her way of demonstrating that infrastructure is getting more resilient without pointing to a single dramatic save. It also shows up in softer signals. For example, unprompted user satisfaction surveys now come back above 90% across most offices.
“Prior to deploying HPE Mist, network performance issues were frequently raised directly to me or other channels, bypassing a formal ticketing structure altogether. Those informal reports effectively just went away altogether. Now, our users have actually come back to thank us for everything working well”, says Lincoln.
Scaling Without Building
As Grant Thornton Advisors continues to grow through acquisition and support 19+ entities, the current architecture provides a scalable authentication and network access control framework without requiring dedicated on-premises or other physical infrastructure commonly associated with traditional NAC solutions. Leveraging HPE Mist Assurance, cloud-managed authentication services, and centralized access policies, the team gains visibility into authentication performance, onboarding success rates, and user experience while supporting growth without significantly increasing operational complexity.
What Comes Next
What Lincoln wants next extends the same logic outward. Her network can already detect and, in limited cases, resolve its own problems. She’s watching for the point where it can also understand intent and recommend or take corrective action with less human involvement. She’s also looking for visibility that extends past her own infrastructure into the parts of the internet she doesn’t control, like carrier-level latency that currently shows up only as an unexplained complaint from a single office.
It’s the same problem she solved once already: making a failure visible enough to fix before someone has to notice it. Making failures visible, and fixable, before anyone notices is what a self-driving network is built to do. Compare self-driving network options to see how HPE Networking is delivering it today.
