The network is more than just a jumble of wires in a closet that keeps the computers in the office online. It is the foundation for all activity within a company – regardless of where that activity takes place (in office or remote). Networks that span multiple domains are now the norm and are more difficult to manage through manual processes than their traditional counterparts. As a result, Gartner predicts that by 2023, more than 60% of enterprises will deem networking as a strategic enabler to their digital strategies, up from less than 20% today.
The days of commoditizing the network and managing it as “just the pipes” is over. Today’s modern networks must be as agile as the technologies they support. Digital transformation cannot occur without a strong infrastructure to support it, which means today’s businesses require a network that can quickly adjust to evolving requirements that enable new services, processes and models.
Here we’ll discuss this network evolution and how its current state will expand to become crucial to organizational growth.
Reactive Versus Proactive Network Management
The network is currently managed in a very reactive way, with manual operations only going so far, resulting in simply maintaining the status quo and keeping the lights on. It is a lack of skills and resources that hinder teams from even considering how to advance network management efforts, effectively and efficiently. Maintaining this reactive approach will also lead to a never-ending backlog of mundane, but important, networking tasks that steal valuable time from the networking team.
In response to such negative consequences, an organization must prioritize proactive strategies to equip teams with the proper training, tools and leadership that promote network automation and reduce the time needed to complete tasks and errors along the way. This enables teams to get ahead of their backlog, build useful automations and complete tasks, focusing on higher priority activities like tuning and improving the existing network infrastructure.
There is also a need to shift from reactive to proactive configuration compliance when it comes to continued successful network operations. A reactive process relies on fixing compliance issues after a break has occurred which will only cause longer disruptions and slower remediation. Adopting a more proactive process will maintain network compliance by not allowing a configuration change to be applied if it violates the configuration standard.
From Siloed to Integrated Teams
Today, network and cloud teams operate in silos with little to no interaction with each other. This disconnect severely hinders time to completion of any network activity. Moving beyond siloed network segments can provide a holistic view of an organization’s entire network where automations and policies can be applied throughout, and devices and resources can be managed in real-time. This shift empowers NetOps and DevOps teams to simplify and accelerate automation initiatives, drastically reduce risks, improve efficiency, and increase agility to launch applications faster and drive overall business value.
For network and cloud teams to integrate into a single team, they must have the proper knowledge and access to each domain through automation that powers integration with a wide range of cloud services and cloud service providers. A great first step to be effective at this is to implement a platform that allows both teams to easily work together building automations, integrating with their own tools and systems. It’s about breaking these silos down to ensure knowledge sharing can occur seamlessly and that teams are armed with the proper knowledge to keep networks operating without disruption, and to respond effectively if a disruption does occur.
Prioritizing the Federation of Data from Multiple Sources
Network engineers don’t always manage different sources of truth, but they need to access multiple sources of truth. Real time automations require the most up to date data from these sources. For success, the flexibility to support such multiple sources is necessary to identify which source of truth needs to be accessed, and accessed quickly, in order for automation to occur.
With that said, network engineers will need to leverage a platform that integrates with each source of truth and can federate data from these systems as needed for network automation to create a unified source of truth. The adage is true, automations are only as good as the data available. Federation creates a meta-map of the connected systems and the data associated with those systems. Instead of retrieving a local copy of the data, which may be inaccurate, a broker process knows which system is the authoritative source of truth. When it processes an activity that requires data from one of the connected systems, an effective automation platform will query that authoritative source of truth to get the most current information. Only then can network engineers properly address the challenges of complex, multi-domain automation scenarios.
The evolution of the network will require a shift from a manual to automated mindset for organizations to sufficiently build a network that is proactive, integrated, and allows for the federation of data from multiple sources. Such a shift will ensure an organization’s success in rapidly building, testing, validating, and deploying any type of network infrastructure with the highest degree of trust and accuracy.
Article originally published on The Fast Mode.
Rich Martin
Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential
Rich Martin is the Director of Technical Marketing at Itential. Previously, Rich has worked at several networking vendors as a both a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager but started his career with a background in software development and Linux. He has a passion for automation in the networking domain, and at Itential he helps networking teams to get started quickly and move forward successfully on their network automation journey.
