Modernizing your company’s networks: The life cycle of Information Technology is getting shorter every year. New competitors are disrupting the industry by bringing new digital practices and processes.
Customer expectations constantly evolve in an increasingly competitive race to deliver the best and most connected experiences.
This has increased pressure on the company’s IT to support leading-edge capabilities such as data analytics, cybersecurity, automated processing, and integration with third-party systems.
Modernizing your company’s networks requires updating the tools and functions and the way IT is thought of. Modernization efforts must create value for the company. Understanding the elements of your IT system needed to achieve your goals is essential.
Below, we’ve separated five ways to modernize your company’s networks and rethink your IT culture to include digitization at the heart of it. Follow us!
Set Everything By Software
Network modernization is essential for digital transformation. Your company network is the IT backbone of your business. With an ever-increasing need for agility and an ever-evolving application landscape, IT leaders are turning to programmable, agile, software-based enterprise networking solutions.
In legacy infrastructure, the data and management planes are tightly coupled, and each device must be reconfigured if changes occur across the entire network. This can result in months of waiting time when making changes. That’s a long time for a digital business.
On the other hand, software-defined systems ( SD-WAN ) separate the control plane from the data plane, allowing the control plane to be centralized. This will enable engineers to make changes from a centralized location and propagate them across the network in near real time.
Adopt AIOps
Today, networks are significantly more complex than they were in the past. At the same time, they are more important from a business perspective, as network outages and even underperforming networks cost a company a lot of money.
Most vendors offer real-time telemetry data to help engineers better manage their networks. The problem is that the amount of data is so large that even the best engineers cannot interpret it quickly and without error.
AIOps ( Artificial Intelligence for AI Operations ) systems, on the other hand, constantly monitor and can alert network operations teams to minor anomalies that can cause performance issues.
Harness The Power Of The Cloud
Cloud computing has transformed every part of IT except the network — until now. Compute, storage, application development, and even security leveraged the cloud to provide grander scale and agility. Now it’s time for the network to follow suit.
Early in the software definition cycle, software was centralized on local controllers, which limited the collected data to one location due to the massive storage requirements of the entire network. However, nowadays, most vendors also offer cloud controller options, which brings many benefits.
First, you can centralize all data across your entire network to provide a comprehensive, end-to-end view of your network. The cloud also enables large-scale growth of compute-intensive workloads such as AI, ensuring scalability at low costs.
Upgrade To Wi-Fi 6 And 5G
If wireless networks were considered convenient in the past but still lost in performance to wired networks, this reality has changed. Wi-Fi 6, the new generation of Wi-Fi, and 5G, the new generation of mobile connection, deliver the level of wireless performance that modern networks demand.
Wi-Fi 6 incorporates many features from the cellular world to reduce congestion and extend range. 5G, in turn, brings Wi-Fi speeds to cellular networks.
Each of them serves different purposes. A typical deployment model combines the two: Wi-Fi 6 is used for general-purpose connections and areas with high customer density, and 5G is used for mission-critical use cases.
Build Security Into Your Network
Historically, networking and security technologies were deployed independently. This was not ideal, but it worked well enough to stop most breaches. Network engineers designed the network, and security experts deployed security tools at every intrusion point.
Two of today’s challenges include tunneling SaaS apps, VPN, and guests accessing the Wi-Fi network. Even with infinite funding for your business, deploying all the security tools you need to protect every point is impossible.
Another point of complexity is the increasing number of security tools. Previously, firewalls and IDS/IPS systems were enough to protect the enterprise. Modern security includes Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Network Discovery and Response, and other tools.
