How often do you think about your network?
For most people, the answer is: very rarely. The network is the unsung hero of the IT world – it does all the heavy lifting quietly behind the scenes. Yet for the network engineering team, keeping this invisible and silent nervous system of the business running is very much top of mind. It’s a full time job to keep it all running smoothly. And in recent years with digitisation, it’s become even more important, and more complex.
And as the role of the network grows, it becomes more important to be able to update and configure it as quickly as possible. On top of this, today’s network has to deal with a terrifying array of security threats – for the average business, it’s 633 attacks a day.
For this reason there is now a real momentum for moving the network from a hardware centric approach to become a software-defined network (SDN). This speeds deployment and makes managing the network more agile. It also opens new opportunities to ensure user experience is kept at the right level and experience isn’t affected. But the real question revolves around security: how do you prevent vulnerability in the network?
Trouble-shooting is an important element of this. For example, there is no such thing as a typical day for a wireless network engineer because operating enterprise wireless networks is about more than providing connectivity and RF coverage. It’s also about getting to the root cause of complex configurations, symptoms, and seemingly random client drop outs from users that have countless personas – multiple device types, operating system and driver versions, and application requirements that were never designed to be wireless centric.
You need to isolate problems for faster trouble shooting to make it easier for engineers to deploy and maintain the network. Automated assurance and analytics provide a way to deliver real-time wireless anomaly detection, automated network forensics, and enhanced root cause analysis capabilities so that administrators can troubleshoot and resolve wireless issues faster and more easily than ever before.
This reduces the necessity and process of troubleshooting, which releases resources for all of the things that the network needs to do.
As the modern workplace changes and the network is required to deal with more users, more apps, and different devices. When it comes to managing the wide area network and branch connectivity, remote, flexible and cross-continental working means lots of organisations have many different IT hubs, or their IT HQ is required to service many branch locations. This fundamentally changes what you need to deliver to each location, and how you can do it.
Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) reduces WAN operational complexity to help deliver secure, high-performance experiences over any type of wide-area network connection. The right SD-WAN solutions can enable businesses to securely connect users to a suite of applications and protect them from the WAN edge to the cloud.
Cisco are building this new network for our customers. So that you can have the agility, operational efficiency and security you need. You can find out more and ask our experts at IP Expo.
So make sure to visit us at the event on 3rd – 4th October to hear how this new network reality requires a different approach to your infrastructure, and how we can help.
Authors
