Current State of Network Operations
As organizations have scaled their adoption of cloud-based resources and distributed workplaces have become the norm, the data center is no longer the central hub for enterprise IT. The Internet has emerged as the new enterprise IT hub. Rapid advances in networking technology have been critical to keeping pace with growing business demands, and enterprise organizations are evolving their IT infrastructure, displacing slower, more resource-intensive, conventional networking models that backhaul traffic to the data center.
But most network teams are struggling. They simply don’t have the tools and resources they need to effectively manage rapidly increasing network device growth and new technology adoption, and are facing several new challenges driven by:
- Infrastructure diversity – today’s network teams need to monitor and manage networks they own, as well as those they do not, including; on-premises networks, ISP networks, CSP networks, and wireless networks.
- Network growth – the number of network devices, endpoints, components and interconnected systems that network teams need to manage and maintain continues to skyrocket.
- Multi-vendor environments – networking equipment and solutions from multiple vendors significantly increases the complexity of managing and integrating disparate technologies, configurations, workflows, and protocols.
- Software-defined and virtualized networks – virtualization technologies and software-defined networking (SDN) introduce new multi-layer virtual, logical, and physical topologies that require specialized expertise to manage and configure.
- Distributed workforce – growing demand for secure remote access and reliable connectivity for employees working from various locations impose new requirements for designing the network, managing security, and optimizing performance.
What’s Needed
Network teams need the ability to understand and manage the performance of digital services across software-defined and hybrid infrastructures at scale. They need a new approach that spans network silos and extends monitoring reach into edge services, multi-cloud, SaaS, and beyond, with a view of every communication path and degradation point of end-to-end delivery.
Network teams need a new approach that enables them to:
- Eliminate Network Visibility Gaps - Most organizations have embraced multi-cloud, leveraging software-as-a-service (SaaS), subscriptions to platform or infrastructure as a service (PaaS or IaaS), and other cloud service providers. While this allows them to match workloads to specific cloud provider attributes and to ensure availability in the event of an outage, moving workloads between clouds or to and from on-premises infrastructure can create network visibility gaps.
- Ensure network performance and reliability beyond corporate boundaries. An enterprise application that performs perfectly in the data center will not necessarily repeat that performance when delivered over the Internet, which wasn’t designed to deliver applications the same way that local-area networks do. Network teams need the ability to integrate legacy and cloud workloads over Internet connections and ensure network reliability in environments where entire applications may transit networks that they do not own.
- Manage the complexity of dynamic, multi-layered SDN. Software-defined networking is rapidly gaining popularity and promises increased agility and flexibility by decoupling network deployment from the underlying hardware. Many organizations are moving to converged or hyper-converged infrastructure, which enables networks to expand and contract on-demand, but also introduces a new multi-layered virtual, logical and physical topology, which dramatically increases management complexity.
- Rationalize and reduce networking tools for end-to-end visibility. Many network teams responded to advances in networking technology and increasing business demands by adding a multiplicity of disparate tools. Because each of these tools is typically designed to manage or monitor a single aspect of the enterprise network, the resulting fragmented toolset can actually hinder end-to-end visibility and obscure service issues accountability. Adding more tools requires more network team resources, which can make them less effective at detecting problems and make their networks less stable.
Network teams need a better convergence of operations; a platform that provides end-to-end visibility across the traditional network infrastructure, the software-defined datacenter, the ISP and CSP networks.
What Makes This So Difficult?
Network teams today are facing a technological inflection point; networks everywhere are being re-architected to support cloud migrations, surging business demands, and escalating user experience expectations. Operations teams struggle to keep pace with a constant influx of software-defined technologies in the data center, stress on the WAN due to highly sensitive applications, and pressures to demonstrate justification for network reliability.
However, the traditional network management solutions that we’ve been using for years are not the answer. They were not designed to handle the accelerated pace of change, the interdependent layering of software-defined networks (SDN), and the transient, dynamic nature of modern inventories and services. Compounding this is the requirement to be aligned with application owners. The ultimate KPI is the user experience, not network performance.
What network teams need is a network management solution that combines contextual diagnostic abilities with actual user experience. They need analytics that can handle high scale correlations and search through monitoring data, as well as the maze of interdependent network layers, and a unified approach that supports traditional infrastructures while providing expert views into modern software-defined networks.
How Broadcom Can Help
Broadcom delivers the unified end-to-end network visibility that network teams need to understand, manage and optimize the performance of digital services running on traditional and modern software-defined network architectures. Network Management by Broadcom extends network teams’ monitoring reach into edge services, multi-cloud, and ISP networks, and enables visibility into every communication path and degradation point, from the core network to the end-user.
With intelligent analytics, Broadcom improves network operations readiness to manage emerging requirements for next-generation network technologies. The single network management platform enables end-to-end, holistic awareness across domains and vendor technologies, helping to break down monitoring data silos and reduce operational complexities.Network Observability by Broadcom uniquely integrates both dimensions of network management and user experience monitoring, ensuring the most comprehensive visibility into every aspect of modern networks. As a result, network management strategies can be aligned with key business outcomes, making the IT organization a better partner driving the accelerated transformation. To learn more, visit the Network Observability by Broadcom YouTube Channel.
This content originally posted here