What is Network Agility
One of today’s most talked about trends in the IT industry is “network agility.” It has IT and network teams buzzing, especially with Gartner having ranked it third on the list of the top 10 trends impacting infrastructure and operations in 2019. It especially piqued our interest when our recent survey found improving network agility to be the top goal for networking and IT professionals in 2019. Since the industry is so heavily focusing on network agility, we wanted to take a closer look at exactly what it is and how network teams can achieve it.
What is Network Agility?
Network agility technically refers to the degree to which an organization’s network infrastructure can leverage policies and automated configurations to operate “autonomously” and self-manage itself. However, the term is also used to describe when NetOps teams are equipped with tools that provide visibility, scalability, and flexibility.
However, achieving network agility is easier said than done. In fact, our recent research found that NetOps teams spend too much time troubleshooting, are unable to proactively monitor the network, and lack visibility across all domains of the network. These challenges are further perpetuated by the increased adoption of cloud services, 5G, and SD-WAN. While these technologies offer impressive business benefits, they can also create a host of challenges and complexities that prevent network agility.
How to Achieve Network Agility?
Old legacy tools that were created for specific use cases like video and VoIP quality simply can’t keep up with today’s complex networks. Without proper insight into the network, NetOps are forced to blindly monitor and troubleshoot. If NetOps teams want to achieve network agility, they’ll need a unified, single-vendor network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) solution like LiveNX.
A unified NPMD solution that ingests multiple data types, such as SNMP, packet data, IPFIX, and NetFlow enables end-to-end, real-time visibility into the network, allowing NetOps teams to proactively monitor and identify issues across the network. This level of visibility equips NetOps teams with the agility to keep up with the changes, issues, and demands of modern networks and better enable them to support their business’ strategic goals and the bottom line, regardless of the complex network initiatives or technologies involved.
