The New Normal Is Complexity – How to Achieve Visibility for Service Assurance
When it comes to Software-Defined Networks (SDN), is it possible to have too much visibility?
No. At least not when it comes to having insight into the network’s performance as well as service assurance. SDNs are complex beasts that are carrying critical business applications at greater data rates, optimized for best paths across diverse telco services to deliver a compelling digital experience for increased customer traction, efficient operations and more productive employees… These are a few of the key areas of discussion addressed in our latest white paper, “Where Too Much Technology Would Never Be Enough,” authored by networking industry experts at Packet Pushers.
To make sure we’re all on the same page, SDNs are designed to help companies leapfrog MPLS and other traditional networking infrastructure with software for the purpose of achieving greater operational efficiencies and better network performance. As a market, SDN is estimated to reach $6B by 2020, according to industry analysts at IDC.
Along with greater efficiencies, other factors driving the popularity of SDN include its ability to help cut WAN costs and shorten provisioning time by replacing expensive private circuits with lower-cost, more readily available broadband internet connections. Also, there’s the plain and simple fact that multi-cloud is the new normal. Users access applications on premise and from multiple cloud environments, requiring network engineers and operators to establish new policies, workflows and traffic engineering to optimize the user experiences across the network.
As network operators and engineers responsible for monitoring and managing the network, this growing complexity is making it more challenging to tie applications and resource consumption to business policies. This is due to a lack of visibility into the application’s performance across the company. What happens next is a compromised user experience, resulting in slowed productivity and unhappy customers.
For businesses to reap its full rewards, SDN needs to be viewed as a service delivering the necessary SLA to applications and users. This requires visibility into service assurance monitoring and management end-to-end. A key aspect of service visibility is the need for proactive analysis of both real-time and trend data. This way, IT can gain insight into what’s likely to happen to get ahead of potential issues and quickly get to the root cause for service restoration.
To learn more about how to make the most of your SDN through greater visibility and service assurance using LiveNX, download the Packet Pushers white paper.
March 5, 2018
Author: Mark Milinkovich
