Retooling the network for a digital future

As the network evolves in tandem with workloads and IT architecture, it is going through not just a shift in complexity or size, but also a qualitative transformation. Companies preparing for digital transformation are becoming increasingly aware that networks with clearly defined perimeters, which can be easily tracked using ingress and egress monitoring, are essentially going extinct. What has replaced them are more nebulous, more elastic networks that enterprises are often struggling to manage using simple and crisp means.

The primary challenge in the new networking context is for an administrator to gain full visibility. With greater visibility also comes greater control, and dashboarding, real-time insight, and ease of use are coveted tools in the network monitoring toolkit.

The cloud is adding further complexity to this, as many often find it difficult to gain insights into the functioning of cloud provider’s network, which can impact application and workload performance. The ability to gain full insight into the cloud network along with the enterprise’s own network is an increasing demand on part of the administrators. APIs play an important role here, as quick and standardised connections into vendor clouds can help set up the monitoring mechanisms to capture metrics from within them.

Automation, especially in the form of artificial intelligence and machine learning — usually housed within analytics or network monitoring platforms — will also form an important apparatus in the network operator’s toolkit. As networks increase in size and intricacy, the sheer number of data points the administrator has to take into account is beyond human capacity. Automated screening of alerts and fault detection as well as healing, in near real-time, can potentially cut down the human resource requirements of network management. Isolating bottlenecks or errors in ever-changing network maps and perimeters can be made much easier using automated and AI- or ML-enabled tools.

Contemporary approaches to adapting the old, static networking model to the cloud and digital era have centred around software-defined networking (SDN). SDN presents a significant milestone in the network’s evolutionary process, as it decouples the application and network layer from the underlying infrastructure, allowing for a more dynamic, more elastic, scalable bandwidth, and future-ready flexibility.

The adaptability and agility provided by SDNs can directly impact a business — in some senses, it is to networking what virtualisation was to hardware. Making the network architecture truly cloud-ready will allow for unfettered innovation across applications and devices, even as SDN allows for administrators to gain unprecedented visibility into and control over the network. Because the SDN controller eliminates much of the need for manual configuration, optimisation, maintenance and security management, SDN implementation is typically one that CIOs or CTOs champion as an obvious waypost on enterprises’ digital transformation journeys.

Virtualisation was the first step away from the entirely hardware-based network — the abstraction enabled by a virtualised environment freed it from strict hardware dependency. The next step has been the cloud, which has freed the networking and application environment from geographic dependence and distributed workloads across environments, platforms, and locations. Containerisation is the next step, allowing for massive scale in deployment of distributed applications and further abstracting away from the hardware core while simplifying the installation and running of applications.

The network, accordingly, has to keep up with these developments, and ensure that deployment platforms — whether in the form of virtual machines, the cloud, or containerised web-scale applications — are well connected. Further, with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the role of the network needs to fundamentally change, as it has to account for millions of endpoints connecting and disconnecting regularly.

During the process of digital transformation, the technical C-suite’s attention is often consumed by new devices, new applications and new cloud models, pushing the network to the background. However, as the substrate that connects all of an enterprise’s software and hardware assets together, the network needs just as much time and care.

The network administrator’s role is changing from dealing with switches, routers and other hardware to sitting behind a dashboard and making sense of the enormous volumes of inbound data from a largely self-organising networks. Charting the network’s evolutionary path is an important part of transforming digitally.

Chat with us if you wish to learn more about the network capabilities to help meet demands of transformative initiatives.