Founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research with a focus on emerging technologies that enable organizations to transform digitally.
In my work with business leaders, I hear again and again how important an enterprise’s network is to its overall strategy, and how critical it is that the network can keep pace with the lightning-fast speed of today’s market.
The problem with today’s legacy networks is that they must be managed one device at a time, making changes cumbersome and time-consuming. IT managers make changes to their networks every day, from updating firewalls to adding new locations to the routing table. While these changes only take a couple of minutes each, they must be repeated thousands of times in a legacy system and can take months to complete company-wide.
IT professionals’ time is better used in other ways, so these tasks, though critical, should be automated. A cloud-based management system can do that.
Why It’s Time To Switch To Cloud-Based Network Management
A cloud-based network management system puts network control in the cloud while network infrastructure stays on the premises. This type of network management offers a wealth of benefits to enterprises, including:
- Improved scalability: The cloud eliminates traditional limitations to scale, such as controller pairs that would have to be replicated for resiliency.
- More efficient location and status services: Providing up-to-date information on the location and status of equipment is still an issue in most companies. Cloud network management can fulfill these needs easily.
- Automatic updates: Cloud-based management platforms are constantly updated by the networking vendor, so there’s no waiting for downloads or any need to update on-premises systems.
- AI-powered optimization: AI and machine learning in a cloud-based system are used to identify problems, remediate, optimize and automate to manage the network efficiently.
- Cost savings: By increasing efficiency and freeing up time, money and resources from your IT department, cloud-based network management allows your team to focus on more strategic projects, saving operating costs.
- More streamlined updates: When the IT manager needs to push out an update to the network, a cloud-based system allows the manager to update the entire network at once instead of having to go device-by-device like a legacy system.
Cloud-Based Network Management Requires A Total Rethink
The best option for cloud networking is not a simple lift-and-shift of your vertically integrated legacy networking to the cloud. By lifting and shifting, you will centralize control, but you’ll bring along the same problems you were dealing with on-premises.
Instead, look for an advanced cloud-based network management system with the following features. Beware, there are many products available on the market, but not all are created equal.
- Security built-in, not bolted on: Once considered an add-on that could be handled down the road, security is now a must-have. As such, it must be built into network design at the outset, not bolted on.
- Anomaly detection: The network should be able to detect if something is unusual within the system, which may indicate an unauthorized change or breach that could affect other functions throughout the company.
- User experience monitoring: Knowing what the customer is experiencing before they call the help desk can be a huge time and headache saver. This can help you fix problems faster and maintain higher productivity company-wide.
- Event correlation: Thousands of events happen in a network every day. Small, seemingly unrelated events can cause or indicate a negative change that affects performance. Event correlation helps IT managers correlate seemingly disparate events to find the root causes of problems within the network automatically.
- AIOps at the center: Artificial intelligence for IT operations allows IT staff to focus on more critical or revenue-generating tasks instead of day-to-day network operations.
- Easy updates: The cloud-based network management system should enable regular feature updates with no downtime, and network upgrades should happen in minutes, not months.
- Open API: A solution should shrink the IT to-do list with an open API that integrates with other solutions.
Resistance To Change Is The Biggest Obstacle
Once you find a cloud-based network management system that works for your business, the biggest obstacle will likely be resistance to change among your IT staff. To operate the new network, retraining will be required, and that’s likely to cause some pushback among traditional engineers. Also, when multiple tasks are now easy enough to be completed by lower-level employees, top-level IT engineers may feel afraid for their jobs.
This can all be addressed by a cultural shift. For the change to be more streamlined and to get employee buy-in, it must come from the top down. When retraining your employees, emphasize that acquiring new skills is great for their resumes and to keep them at the top of their games, career-wise. The world has changed, and legacy systems are on the way out. IT professionals can either be on the front edge or be left behind.
Networking Has Entered The Future
The needs of enterprises have evolved at breakneck speed. The once-staid world of computer networks is being pulled into the future. New cloud-native networking tools will forever change the IT backwater that networking once was. Anyone looking to take their network from the legacy days of on-premises to a land of unlimited possibilities should look at a modern cloud network management tool.
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