How to manage your network (and stop your network managing you)

This is easier said than done when requirements being put onto the network keep changing. But the need is growing ever larger by the year as increasing numbers of digital natives enter the workforce with new ideas, attitudes and expectations. Fresh from university and used to working on a mixture of personal devices, university-owned IT and cloud storage, Generation Y (1981-2000) is a generation of consumers so familiar with connected technologies they have their own ideas about how to bring them into the workplace. Why, they ask, do we use limited storage corporate email accounts when we could switch to unlimited cloud-based accounts and save precious time trawling through archives to retrieve old emails?

They are large consumers of bandwidth-hungry content such as video and prefer more progressive ways of working, such as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and increasingly BYOx (Bring Your Own Everything), where x can stand for anything from wearable devices, to data, to operating systems and apps. Why again, they say, should we be constricted by clunky and outdated corporate devices, when we would be faster, more productive and happier using the latest specification smartphones and consumer-friendly apps sitting in our back pockets?

Millennials aren’t the only ones asking questions. Inspired by the success of digitally-disruptive start-ups, CEOs are looking to the CIOs and asking how their business can remain relevant in a rapidly evolving market. How, they say, can we emulate agile start-ups and technology adopters using cloud technologies to reduce costs, improve scalability and provision the necessary servers needed to bring game-changing products to market first?

The enterprise network is now critical to business success. For the CIO, it has never been more important to have the network capability to cope with the increasing demand for high quality applications that BYOD, big data, cloud computing and flexible working create. But how do you meet employee demands and embrace these new technologies without putting the network at increased risk of outages? How do you take the gamble without accepting the risk?

The simple answer might be to buy more bandwidth. In an application and data centric workforce, however, this is little more than a short-term and cost deficient fix that will last only until more bandwidth is required. The CIO is better placed optimising the network to meet the needs of the digital workforce today and preparing to meet the needs of tomorrow. To do that they need visibility, control and to think holistically about the business’s total communications needs. A better optimised network is not simply an end in itself, but a gateway to a richer, better enterprise experience of cloud, machine-to-machine, unified communications and many more game-changing technologies.

Take control by having greater visibility

For the CIO to ensure the network is up to the job, deeper visibility into the network is needed. This fosters better control to proactively manage the traffic going over the network; and issues that could potentially negatively impact the business can then be usurped to avoid reputation-damaging outages.

Capability now exists that allows you to define, at a granular level, how the network is performing when asked to do certain tasks – something that has not been generally available before. Having the ability to predict and prioritise traffic using network QoS (Quality of Service) is not new in itself, but it is now possible to embed AVC (Application Visibility & Control) technology into the network to provide a solution with no need for additional hardware or infrastructure deployment.

A network embedded with AVC can automatically identify more than 1,500 different applications and report on their performance in real-time and at a granular level that simply wasn’t possible before. This enables the prioritisation of business-critical traffic and ensures end-to-end performance through Application QoS. It also gives the CIO the ability to conduct a forensic analysis of the network by looking through a portal and seeing all of the apps running, geography by geography, and site by site, at any moment in time. 

Imagine the CIO of a global enterprise: they can use that portal to gain a centralised view of every office the world over, to identify which apps are running and which apps are clogging up the network. The CIO didn’t need to deploy different and costly kit at each of those sites to achieve this – by using a network embedded with AVC the technology is already built-in. So now the CIO can not only identify different types of applications, but has the ability to pre-empt issues. If any applications are failing, for example, these can be picked up. Imagine it is Friday afternoon within one of the company’s regional offices and accounts payable need to use cloud-based software to process a number of urgent payments. At the same time, any number of millennial employees are busy streaming videos on their tablets. The CIO can see this happening on the network and put a cap on the applications that are less of a priority.

A prime example is Cisco Systems, where the CIO needs to manage a huge volume of real-time applications running on the network. Using a single Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) IP VPN with embedded AVC, capacity planning can be managed within the network, providing a more centralised way of deploying applications. And by using varying Classes of Service, which enable similar types of traffic on the network to be grouped together, the CIO can prioritise traffic such as voice and video, to enable the use of converged applications such as IP videoconferencing and unified communications.

Seeing the whole picture

Throwing more bandwidth at the network is not the answer. The workplace will keep evolving and demands for transformative technologies will keep growing. The network is the backbone to all of this, which is why it needs to get smarter. An optimised network is better placed to support the expanding role of ICT, whether than means mobile, cloud, machine-to-machine or unified communications. And a CIO who thinks of communications in their entirety and partners with a total communications services provider to accommodate all of these needs in a consistent and consolidated way will have more visibility and control across the total communications needs of the business. That means a richer experience for everyone and a more manageable experience for the CIO.