Nathan Ashby, Senior Solutions Architect at Cisilion, discusses how organisations can drive successful network innovation in the height of a digital era.
The rapid pace of digital change is driving network innovation. The question is whether your network can be agile and supportive of the growing business demands required to run the latest intelligent business apps. Our role as technology leaders is evolving from focusing on keeping the lights on to ensuring our solutions are agile enough to handle the next phase of the digital transformation.
Network architectures have followed the same blueprints built to move ones and zeros around. While technology has evolved in networks, it is too familiar that we create our networks with a core switch, access switches and perhaps a distribution layer, depending on the business’s size and outcomes.
But with the complexities of Artificial Intelligence, more and more sophisticated apps and hybrid working, we need more innovative and intelligent networks to handle and deliver successful outcomes.
Building smart networks in a digital era
So, what does network innovation look like?
Before we answer this, we must change our perspectives on what we design our networks for. One way to look is to look at networks in terms of the workforce (people), workload (applications and tools the workforce is trying to access), and workplace (which is where we have seen most disruption in the last few years). We can think of these as our three Ws. Networks must connect all these elements in different ways to enable the business to operate effectively.
Traditionally, networks were built around everyone being in the exact location with perhaps a little bit of remote access via a VPN or to connect the business to a central DC hosting our business data and applications. As our three Ws changed, this approach did not align with our traditional networks.
Even more so, we’ve moved from keeping the lights on and building reliable infrastructure to business transformation. We cannot use the same mindsets as we once did to ensure the success of our businesses. As such, the network’s driving force enables business outcomes, so we must reinvent the network approach.
With this in mind, connectivity and security are now foundational key outcomes, which must ensure a positive user experience, all while helping strive to achieve improved sustainability. With the pandemic, we realised connectivity could improve as the workplace element changed. Workplaces are no longer just in the office; they can be at home, in a coffee shop, etc.
We must consider integrating home users with our SD-Wan fabric or providing the same level of protection to someone sitting in a coffee shop as we do in the office, where we may have previously invested heavily in firewalls and security tools such as IPS, etc.
What does network innovation look like?
Businesses must build more dynamic infrastructures with automation and better integration to address these changing needs. The adaptability of the network and the agility we can provide with software-defined fabrics are helping deal with this change, whether a change in the location of the workforce or workload. From a networking infrastructure perspective, automation drives change, reducing manpower hours on specific tasks and re-energising time for other activities.
Automation can vary from Infrastructure-as-a-Code (managing and provisioning infrastructure through code instead of manual processes) to an engineer using simple Python to automate a repetitive task they would have done manually before. The value of automation is in automating regular tasks to save time.
Innovative networks also need better programmability – the ability to interface with business software, such as a network solution management node. It’s about the ability to get data out and squeeze data in.
Automation is about time-saving, but integration is about pulling data out of one place and putting it in another, either bi-directional or directional, to improve business processes. For example, ‘I have observed some poor network conditions, so I’m going to make policy changes to improve it’. From a security perspective, it could provide some additional context between security solutions that will deliver better threat protection.
Adding Software-as-a-Solution (SaaS) onto the network can do more for the business; it is an enabler to drive better business outcomes. For example, it integrates foundational security with new security layers, ensuring security around home working. The key is to ensure your network is adaptable enough to use these SaaS solutions.
It’s not always necessary to build a new network to cope with today’s complexities if you already have the appropriate computing power and the flexibility to increase and decrease workloads when needed. It is essential to ensure that when you update software or try to integrate new software into the network, it results in a good user experience.
User experience is critical to the success of your network. For example, chatbots are in high demand due to Chat GPT and the like, but you can also do a lot with simple chatbots. People like language-driven results. For example, network engineers want to receive a message alert when there is an issue with the network, and they want to query it back in a chat as that is a more natural way of working and helps fit into their workload.
It’s also simple to get up and running quickly and doesn’t require them to code because it’s already been created elsewhere and is available for wider use.
Containerisation is another technique that allows for network innovation. It is important to network innovation because it provides a consistent runtime environment, enables continuous integration and continuous delivery, and is more efficient than virtual machines, such as building virtual firewalls within our switches or using apps running natively on our already deployed infrastructure to drive quicker, more secure results.
Containers use fewer resources and deliver higher utilisation of computing resources, which helps with sustainability. It also makes it easier to scale applications up or down as needed, which is essential for modern network architectures.
Adapting to digital changes
For network engineers, network innovation requires a move away from coding to working with scripts, which requires a different mindset. If they can focus on the benefits of working in this new way and see the network as its software platform, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Lots of the material is already available off the shelf from vendors and managed service providers and through network communities such as the Cisco DevNet community.
IT teams must assess how revolutionising their network with automation and AI will help deliver better business outcomes. Showing ROI is difficult, so working with a managed service partner can help demonstrate this.
Once you have a revolutionised network using automation and new tools to drive new outcomes, strong user experience and high levels of security, what happens next? Plug it in, and off you go, right?
No – issues will still arise even with the best designs in the world, whether user error or network outage.
You can quickly pick up on any issues by ensuring you have a good assurance plan and appropriate monitoring tools. A mature assurance solution, like Cisco’s ThousandEyes, can prioritise and grade issues in terms of risk and cost. This is achieved by applying intelligence or machine learning to help interpret the network’s data. This visibility of what is happening across your network is now available to everyone and can help change your response to issues from reactive to proactive. You can start to predict likely problems that can be addressed before they occur, which is the ideal goal of an intelligent network.
As technology evolves, our networks must work harder and be more intelligent to deliver successful business outcomes. By harnessing automation and containerisation and ensuring assurance across your network, you can pioneer innovation to ensure continued business success.
By doing this, we can drive network innovation and, in turn, provide the best user and business outcomes instead of just moving zeros and ones around.
