In today’s era of dynamic disruption, IT leaders are taking center stage in navigating a complex and vast network. It’s a balance of accelerating digital initiatives such as AI with the need to securely transform IT operations and increase business.
Navigating these complexities can be challenging. How do you handle an intricate array of devices, cloud applications, and workloads, especially when users are located everywhere? On top of that, how do you build a resilient network that can protect your people, systems, and data from external threats?
The answer is the network platform. It’s a real, readily accessible approach that integrates software, security, policy, and open APIs with an intuitive user interface, advanced telemetry, and automation. The platform powers network devices to help you deliver your business outcomes and provides the agility needed to address unforeseen use cases.
Here are five key reasons why moving to a network platform can be the foundation for a more powerful future
- Simplified operations
Network complexity seriously hinders efforts to protect users and data from attack and is a major contributor to degradation in network reliability. Achieving greater simplicity in IT and network operations is a key goal, and a prime factor driving the adoption of a network platform approach for many organizations. Network platforms simplify operations by facilitating the removal of organizational silos among data, teams, and processes that are common in most organizations. By unifying APIs, access rights, and user interfaces across domains, individual departments can readily share data across network domains, enhancing operational efficiencies through improved day-to-day collaboration.
AI and machine learning (ML) also have a crucial role to play in the evolution toward greater operational simplicity. A network platform approach creates an extensive data set that draws from different domains in the network, which AI-assisted capabilities in the platform can leverage to drive automation. AI-assisted automation can eliminate many manual tasks, reducing the risk of human error, which accounts for the most common network issues.
2. Consistency
Along with simplifying operations, IT leaders are looking to network platforms to improve operational consistency throughout the network. Consistency is especially important for IT departments tasked with managing complex, multi-domain networks. In these environments, unifying and integrating platform capabilities like identity management, policy automation, segmentation, analytics, and assurance are essential for creating consistent architectures and design principles across domains, implementing proven best practices, increasing standardization, and enhancing security.
3. End-to-end assurance
As applications and users move beyond the traditional enterprise network, network operations teams are finding it increasingly difficult to gain visibility into end-to-end performance. A platform approach delivers advanced capabilities for enabling organizations to ensure quality digital experiences over the network. It enhances network visibility by collecting data and feeding it into an analytics engine. The analytics engine analyzes massive volumes of telemetry data and quickly identifies network performance and security problems requiring immediate attention. This network platform approach not only gives IT teams visibility across the entire network, it also equips them with a rich set of tools and technologies for monitoring, diagnostics, predictive analytics, and more.
As with other operational areas, AI can be leveraged in the network platform to take a more proactive approach to assuring network performance. AI can help create better-informed insights while constructing an end-to-end view of service delivery and performance. AI helps automate remediation when issues like wireless interference and WAN bottlenecks are uncovered and can also be applied to help predict and prevent network degradation from occurring in the first place.
4. Network and security integration
Network configurations that are out of compliance are a major cause of security breaches. A network platform approach allows IT organizations to reduce security risks proactively in the network. Integrations between network and security platforms allow for greater visibility and collaboration between network and security teams, which is necessary to accelerate threat detection, triage, and remediation across the organization. A network platform also allows IT teams to run automated compliance checks regularly, which makes it faster to update software, remediate threats, and correct identified anomalies.
5. Open APIs and ecosystems
Another major benefit of a platform approach is the exposure to APIs for accelerating both IT and business innovation. APIs offer technology partners and developers the opportunity to quickly build value on top of the network data and insights made available by the platform. With common API authentication, naming, and management, platforms can simplify the integration of the network into streamlined IT workflows and innovative digital initiatives. IT teams can identify the third-party solutions that meet their technology or business needs via an ecosystem marketplace, while developers and technology partners can use developer hubs to access the tools, code, and information they need to fully leverage the available APIs.
Get started on your network platform journey
Looking to get started on your platform journey? Cisco is here to help. As a trusted and committed partner, we will work with you to implement a network platform strategy across all network domains, including access, WAN, data center, cloud, and operational technology (OT) environments to help you reach your IT and business goals faster. We can also help you develop a roadmap for the future that allows you to evolve your network platform as your business and technology requirements change.
Learn more about the power of network platforms by watching the webinar, Simplify Operations with a Platform Approach, featuring product specialists from Cisco and a guest speaker from IDC.
