Keeping Up with the Digital Transformation on Networks

Having a good network infrastructure is much more important in this day and age. We are in a digitally advanced era where employees, customers, cloud applications, and internet-enabled devices connect to the business directly. The advancements in technology have made the non-differentiated and static network edge insufficient in many ways, which is why enterprises look to upgrade their networks to keep up with the digital transformation.

It’s vital to look at the networking benefits, as well as other aspects like adopting software-defined networking or SDN and improving security in order to propagate changes promptly throughout the network to help manage the challenges created by digital transformation.

Hurdles of Digital Transformation

Most of the business applications these days are reengineered and migrating to public and/or private clouds. These applications heavily depend on the services available across the cloud. As the cloud services are linked by the network, it should be available round-the-clock because any kind of network disruption will affect the performance of the application.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is no longer an operational technology alone. It has emerged as the core component of the digital transformation strategies of most businesses. With the increase in IoT adoption, the number of connected endpoints will also rise.

The majority of business devices are connected by the network edge. This means that any problem with the edge could affect IoT applications. Traditionally, network value was regarded highest in the data center because it housed the applications and data, and it was considered lowest at the edge. IoT has changed that by evenly distributing the network value.

The developments in wireless technology also come to play here. Wi-Fi speeds are at par with that offered by wired connections. This makes Wi-Fi a convenient as well as an essential mode of connecting to the network. Moreover, many of the modern business tools and IoT devices support wireless connection only. These trends have made Wi-Fi the main network access method, whereas the edge is where all of the devices connect to the enterprise network.

IoT endpoints, cloud computing, and mobile devices have led to the creation of several new entry points as well. Moving all of those to the network edge can lead to many security concerns. Legacy networks used to have only one entry/exit point, which made it easy to check all the incoming and outgoing traffic using a firewall. Yet now, network security should move to the network to be more effective.

Below is what you should do to overcome the hurdles of digital transformation.

Automate

Manual processes are rapidly being replaced by faster and superior automation. If you still stick with manual processes for your network, it could lead to many kinds of problems. On the contrary, automation can easily remove the time-consuming burden from network engineers and allow them to focus on other strategic projects. Additionally, automating the recurring tasks in managing the network will help you advance to an intent-based network. This means that your network will respond automatically and more promptly to the admin requests.

You can automate a lot of things in your network. However, it will be better to start with automating the most time-consuming tasks, such as OS and firmware updates, applying security patches, and/or executing policy changes.

Implement SDN

You need to make sure that your network is highly agile. This way, you can ensure that the changes are propagated throughout the network quickly, which will make certain that it keeps up with the growing demands of your enterprise. Centralized control can give your network the required agility, as that allows to make configuration changes and propagate it across the network instantaneously. You should make sure that the network changes are coordinated with the changes in the applications, so that no lagging performance issues affect your business operations.

If your network is more than 5 years old, then you will need to implement SDN to refresh the network infrastructure and achieve a superior level of agility. Traditional infrastructures used to have a data plane and integrated control, which needed the changes to be made on a box-by-box basis. This made it a complicated and lengthy process, in turn making the networks slower.

SDN separates the control plane from the data plane, giving you centralized control. This allows network engineers to create and push a change across the network in almost real-time.

Note that legacy equipment is not designed for modern software compatibility. Therefore, make sure that your network infrastructure features a modern OS like Linux, which can be easily programmed with current languages like Python or Ruby.

Learn Networking APIs

Your network should adapt to software characteristics as you prepare for digital transformation. One way to ensure that is by using APIs, which will allow your network to communicate with the applications directly and lead to a better level of automation. For instance, you can have your video conferencing application signal your network to allocate more resources when making a call and then remove those after the call has ended.

Make sure that your network engineers learn the required skills to make the most of APIs and implement them fittingly in the infrastructure. Most of the network engineers will be well versed with homegrown scripts, but most have never made an API call. Therefore, it’s important to have them acquire modern software skills so that you can leverage the speed and simplicity of APIs.

Adopt Built-in Security

Having built-in security is much better to tightly couple it with the network than implementing it as an overlay. Intrinsic security allows your network to serve as a security platform, which uses a broad ecosystem with the best-of-breed tools for threat detection, mitigation, as well as to deliver integrated and automated compliance checks. Built-in security also protects your network throughout the session when a new device connects to the network.

Although the network itself can never serve as good as a next-gen firewall, it can surely offer a great level of security. As your network infrastructure sees all incoming and outgoing traffic, it can collect enough data to detect if something goes wrong, which could point towards a breach.

For instance, if an IoT device connects to the same cloud every day and tries to communicate with an accounting server suddenly one day, then it could mean a malicious intrusion. Having intrinsic security in the network will help to quarantine the device in such a case and have a security tool to diagnose the problem.

Refresh

Investing in new technologies that rely on the network is a vital part to succeed in the digital world. Legacy network infrastructures were not designed for today’s demanding digital business, which is why you should upgrade and refresh them to operate and manage the tasks efficiently. You should invest in equipping your network with the latest technologies and re-train your network engineers to take full advantage of that. Doing so will ensure that you do not struggle with application performance, user experience, or security breaches, but will maximize your business growth with digital transformation.