11 April 2024
Dave Chen, head of switching product marketing, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
As we know, the sole guarantee business leaders have is that change is constant. According to Accenture’s Pulse of Change: 2024 Index, released ahead of January’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, business disruption is expected to accelerate much faster than expected, with technology ranked as the number one reason.
Generative AI, IoT, and other connected technologies continue to reset business expectations and create challenging dynamics for IT teams to accommodate. Networks play a pivotal role in enabling data services and are increasingly looked to as the lifeline for IT to address priorities around user experience, application performance, access and deployment, interoperability, and integration.
Advanced automation capabilities like AIOps and integrated IoT operations connections are needed to help IT teams manage new scale and complexity requirements while security concerns become a natural part of the networking conversation and are becoming a leading necessity in next-generation refresh initiatives. But as these capabilities are made available, piecemeal, distributed, and overlay solutions intended to address gaps in IT infrastructure will more than likely create more chaos rather than simplify design.
The network is the new business imperative
The critical role networks play in enabling data services and the deployment of line of business technology, such as IoT-based energy management solutions, means their performance and health are key to business success and providing a consistent experience for connected users and devices. Addressing cloud-native cybersecurity and compliance issues also requires a new strategy – one that embraces Zero Trust Security to stay ahead of evolving threat landscapes and mitigate cyber risk.
Advanced AI-powered technology can enhance available network tools to ensure continuous network optimisation for applications and users – and, critically for network administrators, helps to automate increasingly broad and complex IT processes and procedures to allow for more efficient network operations.
Securely delivering critical business data and services requires a network services architecture that is versatile and flexible enough to meet the needs of both networking and security teams – one that will drive the business further forward into the digital era.
As UK enterprises build out their next-generation networks, they should look to a security-first, AI-powered network solution as the foundation needed to unify their infrastructure and scale their resources for the future. This will not only accelerate line of business outcomes but elevate end-user and IT experiences.
Security-first, AI-powered networking
By implementing a unified infrastructure solution, enterprises will benefit from networking and security design advancements made within the hardware and software capabilities they choose to deploy.
With a unified solution, network policies can follow the user – and use case – of the enterprise’s deployment to ensure consistent access and segmentation is applied no matter when and where connectivity is required. AIOps capabilities could also be immediately enabled over WiFi, switching, and wide area networks that are centrally managed, providing the enterprise’s IT team with a smart jumpstart to network performance optimisation and diagnostics. Flexibility and choice in deployment architecture also help networking staff maintain control and adhere to industry or corporate compliance requirements while optimising time and resources.
Unified infrastructure benefits help enterprises’ networks work smarter, not harder, by providing:
• Improved IT efficiency: Encourage collaboration between IT teams focused on end-user services, IoT and application development, network operations, and security, risk, and compliance by ensuring network tools and operations are accessible and collaborative.
• Consistent end-user experience: Ensure users and devices are granted access where needed – and the network can proactively optimise and analyse areas of concern by using advanced visibility and segmentation capabilities across access, core, and data centre network fabrics.
• Reduced cyber risk: With the appropriate visibility and access controls automatically in place, network teams can more efficiently secure against external actors, identify and mitigate at-risk assets, and meet industry compliance requirements with instant access to appropriate alerts and reports available across cloud and on-premises deployment options.
• Accelerated IoT adoption: Accelerate deployment of line of business technologies such as onsite WiFi and wired networking, point of sale systems, security cameras, Bluetooth, and more by utilising vendor direct IoT integrations.
It’s time to make a move
Choosing a platform with these capabilities will enable IT and networking staff to free up time to focus on what’s important.
By reducing time-consuming, manual management of network design they can invest more resources into strategic initiatives. They will also be able to increase insight into end-user and network security with deep visibility and automated policy enforcement, as well as gain greater control over power consumption with oversight of the network’s environmental impact and cost.
Now is the time to investigate a network that will unlock these advantages.
