The data center has traditionally been the central backbone of your IT strategy. The core hub and home for applications, routing, firewalls, processing and more. But trends such as the cloud, mobility and working from home as a result of the pandemic are turning everything upside down.
Now the enterprise relies on distributed workspaces and cloud-based resources that generate traffic outside the network, such as work from home or cloud platforms. Conventional network models that send traffic back to the data center are considered slow, resource-intensive, and inefficient. Ultimately, the internet is the new business network.
If the core data center is the backbone, then the wide-area network (WAN) must be the poor, right? During the pandemic, a survey found that 52% of US companies adopted some form of SD-WAN technology. Larger enterprises, such as national (79%) and global (77%) companies, have adopted SD-WAN much faster than smaller companies.
But operational visibility is an essential part of an SD-WAN deployment because, unlike MPLS links, the Internet is a diverse and unpredictable means of transport. SD-WAN Orchestrator application policies and automated routing decisions simplify day-to-day operations, but can also degrade overall end-to-end performance. As a result, applications may run slower than before a corrective action, making solving these issues very difficult without additional insight or validation.
View beyond the edge
Just think of the number of possible paths data can take to be delivered end-to-end. If you take the example of an organization with 100 branches, two data centers, two cloud providers, 15 SaaS applications and four ISPs, there are more than 7,000 possible network paths in use at any given time. If the network team sticks to traditional network monitoring, limited to branch offices and data centers, that means the overall visibility is reduced to less than 2% of the estate (102 paths over 7000+). The lack of visibility beyond the edge of the corporate network can cause network operations to spiral out of control.
In addition, most SD-WAN vendors only measure and provide visibility from the customer’s edge to the customer’s edge – basically the peripheral network devices and the secure tunnels that connect data centers to branch offices, banks, stores, etc. to deliver a reliable and secure user experience across this new and complex network architecture, network professionals need end-to-end visibility; not just edge to edge.
Experience-driven NetOps is an approach that extends visibility beyond the edge of the data center and to the branch offices, remote sites, ISP and cloud networks, and remote users to provide visibility from the end-user perspective (which they connect to in the enterprise). ) rather than from a controller-only edge perspective. In addition, thousands of other network devices reside behind the edge of an SD-WAN deployment. Do you really want another tool to manage those devices?
Make no mistake, if you’re deploying new software-defined technologies, but still don’t understand the end-user experience delivered by these architectures, you’re only solving half the problem of delivering the network support your business expects. Today, reliable networks must be proven by experience. And network operations teams need to become experiential.
In this eBook, Guide to Visibility Anywhere, you can learn more about how to meet the new challenges of the user experience. Read now to learn how organizations can create network visibility at the edge of the network and beyond.