Automate The Networking Operations For Greater Efficiency And Easy Scalability

In the wake of rapid technical advances, the IT infrastructures and networking operations are getting complex with each passing day. The endpoints connecting to the network are growing at an exponential pace.

An Ericson study, with a report featured in Forbes, stated that by 2023 IoT connections are expected to reach 3.5 billion. Such a huge number of endpoints leave Networking Operations teams with a high burden of manual configuration, leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies in operations.

Different industries have different loads on their applications and servers, so have a different level of networking infrastructure requirements. On the basis of network capacities required, the top 5 industries that must automate their networking operations are:

1. Banking and insurance:

Companies in these verticals need to offer a greater bandwidth to better serve all the consumers that need to interact in real-time. Financial services providers like those dealing with credit cards and digital payments receive around ten thousand transaction requests every day, creating a considerable load on the IT and Network team.

2. Telecommunications:

Communications carriers have been the legacy providers of connectivity, but in the recent digitization, they need to scale up the services to remain relevant in the highly competitive environment. Telecom service providers now are in need to develop efficient self-help portals that can allow customers to easily manage their various accounts. Other sophisticated cloud-based telecom platforms also allow their customers to build out special network capabilities with the help of virtualized network functions. For provisioning these services fast, telecom providers need to automate their networking operations throughout their ecosystem.

3. Cloud and IT services:

The business organizations in this sphere gain the most by upgrading global access of their digital services using various interconnection options among networks, business associates and the end-users. Improving virtualized connections between multiple networks, clouds and users, and enhancing the bandwidth are the major tasks regarding upgradation, leading to an ever-increasing load at the servers, which is manually handled by the IT & NetOps team.

4. Securities and Trading:

Measured by the speed in which they can handle a growing number of transactions, securities and trading companies need to scale their digital platforms to do more trades faster, while maintaining strict compliance regulations.

5. Content and Digital Media:

As per Cisco’s Visual Networking Index report, global IP video traffic is projected to be 82% of all IP traffic by 2021. So a high bandwidth and greater interconnections is a high priority for the service providers.

Challenges

•  Operational Challenges: The organizations in the field of such digital services receive thousands of online service requests on a daily basis. There are various application instances running in distributed data centers to support such high traffic. To seamlessly deliver better customer service, the DevOps teams are required to continuously develop new features and related applications.   

The new application instances or the upgrade require configuration change on the LTM & DNS devices that land into the NetOps pipelines in form of a service request.

In general, the NetOps teams receive thousands of service-requests every month. Altering the VIPs, WIPs, DNS records; activating and deactivating pools for server rotations and report creations are major tasks.  

It has also been concluded that 70% of network configuration is done manually and 44% of the IT operators say network changes lead to outages or performance issues several times a year. A Gartner press release in June 2019 concluded that 70% of IT’s time is spent trying to identify and diagnose issues.

The absence of a standardized workflow and the security concerns are other issues needing attention. The internet-connected devices on enterprise networks can be hacked in as little as 3 minutes.

• Scalability Challenges: As the network is added with more users, nodes and data, the Network Operation teams also struggle hard to keep the performance of their networking infrastructure at its peak. Managing & scaling up the network requires more time and attention, keeping the concerned IT teams busy with monotonous manual tasks. These efforts and time of the NetOps team, if focused on the core business operations, could have a long-term impact on the bottom line.

Solution

Taking note of the aforementioned issues, automating the network management and device orchestration is the most optimized solution.

A centralized 1-touch process that configures, manages, tests, deploys, and operates the physical and virtual devices automatically is the network automation and that helps enterprises with enhanced efficiency, error-free executions, and lower operational costs.

But the problem arises in selecting the network automation and management platform, which is best suited for the organization.

The Ultimate Network Automation and Management Platform: ADC+

AppViewX ADC+ is a GUI-based, API-driven platform, which is one of its kind solutions for MANO (Manage, Automate, and Orchestrate), simplifies and speeds up the ADC lifecycle automation.

The efficient management of the technically complex process is the biggest challenge around network automation and with ADC+, this can be easily self-serviced, providing you the standardized solution to make your team focus on the core business operations.

Leading Edges

• Self-serviceable orchestration: With script-free automation tasks, create and modify the VIPs and WIPs and migrate or upgrade the ADCs through a GUI-based pane. The zero-touch orchestration through in-built ITSM and IPAM solution allows the app teams to auto-provision ADC services and enable/disable objects for blue-green deployments.

• App-centric visibility and remediation: With real-time monitoring of the health-state and ADC objects’ performance, ADC+ eliminates the downtime chances. With the closed context-aware workflows, the event-driven auto-remediation operations are auto-executed and the potential vulnerabilities are instantly notified.

• Actionable insights: Collating data from disparate sources through REST APIs, ADC+ offers you detailed, personalized reports to drive better-informed business decisions. Also, with the information regarding CPU utilization, application traffic statistics, unused VIPs, optimize the application performance by orchestrating the ADCs accordingly.

• Centralized Device Management: Through a single GUI-based pane, control and automate any kind of ADC device sourced through any vendor, and with the real-time visibility of the state, stay on top of your application delivery network.

• Policy-Driven Compliances: ADC+ helps prevent data loss during system failures or forced shutdowns by taking scheduled/on-demand backups of data & configurations and restoring them as needed. It proactively rectifies the configuration drifts by comparing any two configurations with Diff Checker and easily rolls back to the last-known-good-configuration. Self-service Portals with Configurable Branding and Role-based Pages/Views offers the best peace of mind for the sense of data security.

Benefits to the businesses

The leading-edges of ADC+ offer following set of benefits to the businesses in the big-picture:

1. With automation and self-serviceable orchestration, the number of service requests that the organization can handle, dramatically increases several times in the same time.
2. Automation helps clear the backlogs and accelerate service delivery. The time required to process a service request falls from days to minutes!
3. The optimization of the resources and the time & efforts saved, help scale up the operation without adding new staff members. With such simple practice, the organizations can save millions per year.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blogs – AppViewX authored by Devanshu Dawn. Read the original post at: https://www.appviewx.com/blogs/automate-the-networking-operations-for-greater-efficiency-and-easy-scalability/