Enterprises moving to a hybrid cloud model hold plenty of operations to enable their network infrastructure in the most efficient way possible. Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders should focus on bringing network configuration and operation agility as a part of their digital initiatives. As modern networks encompass advanced technologies, processes, and user-traffic on a global scale, its management gets complex. Besides, security concerns and infrastructure-related risks are constant.

Many organizations still manage their networks using traditional legacy framework; thus, compromising on high availability, performance, and low latency. In addition to the pressure of managing siloed architecture, Network and Operations management teams are tasked with:

• Executing repetitive maintenance procedures,
• Running extensive processes, and
• Monitoring the entire infrastructure using a discrete set of tools

Nowadays, automation is the lever for simplifying every complex operation, task, or process. Next-gen network automation not only addresses a multitude of network inefficiencies and challenges but also helps save on operational expenditures. Let's discuss what do you need to drive efficiency and stay competent.

What should enterprises gun for?

I&O leaders accountable for establishing a stable, cost-effective network should shift their focus toward agile culture across the networking teams by implementing network automation.

Today, digital businesses or companies jump-starting digital initiatives cannot afford network outages, inept handling of traffic fluctuations, frequent performance issues, poor security and incident management, etc. An intelligent, thought-through approach is essential for:

• Optimization of network operations (NetOps) such as fault management, performance management
• Unified management of overall network
• And, automation of network configuration, changes, and incident diagnostics

Leveraging a scalable and robust network management solution that provisions best network topology, automated configuration, and high speed is a smart move.

However, investment in network automation does not mean rushing out and spending on just any platform or solution for simplifying your network operations. To pull the right strings, you need to thoroughly evaluate the solution and its capabilities that align with the business case.

Network performance optimization

You must have end-to-end visibility into your network infrastructure to stay on top of every change, every event that takes place. This helps in the early detection and resolution of performance inefficiencies.

Gartner says, “…organizations that automate more than 70% of their network change activities will reduce the number of outages by at least 50% and deliver services to their business constituents 50% faster…”

To address the underlying challenges of traditional and modern networks, Micro Focus Network Operations Management (NOM) offers unparalleled NetOps innovation. With its integrated automation capabilities, you significantly improve your network uptime and performance. The unified, ready-to-use toolset helps manage the change activities that can impact your infrastructure’s overall health. The analytics-driven platform provides:

• Deeper insights into your existing network
• Smart graphical visualizations that tell how well your network is performing
• Custom metrics for root cause identification

These additional performance analysis metrics and built-in workflows help your operator optimize the mean time to repair (MTTR) with easy fault incident assessment and remediation.

NOM’s real-time monitoring and reporting give you a clear understanding of traffic patterns, bandwidth, and CPU utilization, spikes during peak load hours, and application distribution across your network. It further helps in capacity planning and proactive prevention of data center outages.

Orchestration of network configuration, upgrade, and remediation

While automation is of the essence in this hybrid era, orchestration is the bedrock of network transformation. Heterogeneous and modern network topology does have performance and efficiency benefits, but it surely is complex to maintain. NOM enables your NetOps teams to not only break through the organizational silos but also provides the flexibility to scale network deployments or hosting across physical, cloud (both public and private), and virtual environments.

Gartner’s research on network automation further derived the following benefits organizations will reap to scale their digital initiatives:

• Agility — An automated network change or operations activity should occur at least 90% faster (and likely more) than one that is manually operated. This can result in faster delivery of servers and application delivery to business leaders.
• Availability — Network automation should reduce manual errors by more than 75%, which increases uptime because the manual error is a leading cause of outages.
• Opex — An automated change requires only a small fraction of the operational expense of a manual change, often less than 2%.

Powered with Micro Focus’ Operations Orchestration (OO) capabilities, NOM facilitates exceptional policy-driven configuration management to keep your network infrastructure compliant. The coordinated workflows automatically manage the operator’s manual actions, including network upgrades, configuration changes, state of the network devices, and their OS versions. NOM also allows you to orchestrate automatic rollbacks whenever there is a failed configuration change, unusual activity or deviation in the expected norms.

Your enterprise network, therefore, attains maximum efficiency and is free from manual errors with this next-generation automation.

Addressing all the network security concerns

Information and device security has always been and continues to be the topmost priority in any IT operations unit. Modern network infrastructure is no exception for emerging security threats such as intrusion, denial of service (DoS), compromised ports, traffic analysis attacks, and more. Having a robust, advanced network security management solution has become very critical to keep your security posture intact.

Micro Focus’ NOM extends its monitoring and real-time automation capabilities beyond any standard network monitoring or intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS).

• Real-time dashboards that auto-detect, alerts NetOps teams, and remediate potential threats in your network
• The single-view platform provides a complete assessment of your infrastructure’s state, including open risk incidents, risk events, vulnerable devices, and compliances achieved across network nodes
• Detailed audit and compliance reports help you identify and close the loopholes in your network, and meet regulatory requirements

Besides, the all-in-one platform reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) by cutting down all the expenditure on different tools, onboarding training, and technical support.

Conclusion

An efficient, highly available, and scalable network is a must-have for digital businesses. Automation being the cornerstone of network intelligence, I&O leaders need a mind shift towards agile, customer-focused approaches. A comprehensive network automation toolset that offers A-Z of network management (SDNs, physical, or virtual) enables your teams to focus on strategic programs and build a resilient architecture.

Learn more about the Micro Focus’ Network Operations Management solution!