AIOps Fails to Measure up to its Promise
AIOps continues to be written about by pundits as the next “big” thing in IT, yet as with so many technology research projects, it has yet to deliver even a...
Feb 8, 2023
Network Automation is the biggest untapped opportunity for network security in operations today. “According to a report published by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), a record number of 1862 data breaches occurred in the USA in 2021, up 68% from 2020.” Preventing network security disruptions becomes key.
The Security Problem with Today’s NetOps
- Security compliance and outage prevention is not proactive
- Modern network technologies are managed using decades-old approaches
- NetOps is focused on device health rather that business outcomes
- SMEs exist locally, but cannot be leveraged effectively
- Resources are not as plentiful as they had once been
- NetOps is consumed with tickets, solving the same problem over and over
- Escalations take time, increasing MTTR, risk, and costs
- Nearly all NetOps is reactionary but needs proactive management
The False Sense of Security
Security goes far beyond purchasing and deploying the latest firewall hardware and software. Every part of a security architecture must be continuously verified.
- Do you know ALL of your Device, Border, Edge and Zone requirements?
- Examples: Does TELNET traverse the network? Are specific ports open?
Continuous observability and control verification at scale must exist to ensure your network and data are protected, always. For your network to be application-aware, you must be able to understand, manage and enforce the specific requirements and control in place to ensure orchestration and automated response to any threat.
Forward-Looking Operational Plans
Current NetOps is reactionary, inefficient, inconsistent, labor-intensive, engineer specific, redundant, time-consuming, not sharable, and not scalable. Something must change. How can we:
- capture the expertise of our SMEs?
- share that experience across the organization?
- execute knowledge more automatically?
- apply that experience pro-actively?
- continuously verify the network supports the business.
NetOps must Focus on Outcomes, Not Devices
Thinking of your network as 100,000 desired outcomes instead of 1000 boxes allows you to better align with and deliver on a diverse set of business outcomes. When outcomes are intact, business applications and services perform more effectively.
Automatically Enforce Network Security
Security must be continuously verified at every device, border, edge, and zone to be effective at minimizing risk. Security and service degradations can always be prevented one situation at a time, but to do so at scale requires an automated approach. By focusing on security and service delivery outcomes, all other operational processes become more relevant and aligned with the business itself.
Everyone can leverage network automation using a no-code approach to reduce service delivery and outage risks, scale resources without the typical rise in headcount, and reduce the operational costs associated with the network. Network engineers and operators can proactively address outages, automate remedial diagnosis, identify application performance issues, enforce network security architectures, and defend change management processes to eliminate unintended consequences.
With Intent-based Automation, subject matter experts can leverage no-code approaches to make their expertise available to all others across any organization, and even collaboratively with SecOps and other ops teams. That same captured knowledge can be executed by less experienced operators and automatically by the machine, dramatically reducing the time it takes for operators to resolve network problems of any size.