CISCO report on global networking trends for 2021. Operations.

Business Resiliency Special Edition: See the five trends driving agility and resilience in times of change. We have broken down the report into three blogs, in this last blog we will address the trends on operations, nº4 and nº5 . Trends:

1. Workforce: Extend security to a remote workforce.
2. Workplace: Allow safe return to local workspaces.
3. Workload: Facilitate multicloud for greater resiliency.
4. Operations - Automation of operations for faster recovery.
5. Operations: Leveraging AI-powered network analytics for smarter insights.

If you want to see the first part: See report CISCO report on network trends for 2021. Resilience. Workforce and workplace.

If you want to see the second part: See CISCO report on networking trends for 2021. Resilience. Workload, multicloud networks

Operations: automated
Trend #4: Operations - Automation of operations for faster recovery

The explosion in the number of dispersed remote workers isn't the only thing putting extraordinary pressure on today's NetOps teams. (The NetOps figure focuses on the tasks of automating operations and adopting best practices for collaborative workflows).

The pandemic has also caused unprecedented levels with strong fluctuations in the number of clients, application traffic patterns and new use cases such as e-learning, video conferencing, virtual events, remote attention, process automation and other services that depend on the network. .

So it's no wonder that half of network professionals today recognize network automation as a critical requirement to ensure continued service and performance during an outage.

Network Considerations – NetOps professionals can achieve continuous improvement and respond quickly to growing disruptions and threats by taking a step-by-step approach:

• Automate repetitive administrative tasks such as network provisioning, configuration, and image management to reduce administrative burden and improve compliance in each domain.
• Automate network access, onboarding , and segmentation to protect distributed user groups and devices by mitigating the spread of cybersecurity attacks.
• Automate network policy within the enterprise data center with application-centric segmentation that protects applications and data while maintaining workload continuity.
• Automate policy beyond the data center with a cloud operating model that delivers consistent enforcement policy across on-premises and hybrid cloud environments.
• Automate end-to-end, multi-domain policy-based segmentation by establishing a consistent, zero-trust access model from users and devices to workloads.

Operations: AI-enabled
trend no. Insight #5: Operations: Leveraging AI-driven network analytics for smarter insights

Managing the complexity and scale of modern networks along with the resulting deluge of events and issues that bombard multiple different monitoring platforms can be overwhelming, and ineffective, especially when an outage occurs.

“4400: Average number of wireless-related events per month in an enterprise network. * ” Source: Cisco Telemetry: Cisco DNA Center, 2020
* Based on over 600 enterprise networks.

Events include failures/join times, radio throughput, and DHCP response time/failures. These event numbers have already been reduced using AI-enabled dynamic baselines.

Clearly, teams of NetOps professionals need the help of advanced analytics to make smart and timely remediation decisions.
By using AI-enabled network analytics and machine learning techniques, NetOps departments are achieving a much more manageable set of problems that they can act on.

“Globally, Cisco AI Network Analytics, an application within Cisco DNA Center, resolves 2.6 million “events” monthly into 15,080 actionable “problems,” a 99.4% reduction. * ” Source: Cisco Telemetry: Cisco DNA Center, 2020 *Based on more than 700 enterprise networks globally.

This reduction allows teams to focus all their efforts on the things that really matter and have the potential to negatively impact the business.

And this problem is no longer limited to the corporate network. Now that most network transactions originate or terminate outside of the traditional corporate network, NetOps teams also need visibility and analytics into the public networks they are connected to. This is especially important during periods of unusual stress, such as the recent pandemic.

Network considerations – To understand a tsunami event, NetOps teams must adopt AI-enabled network analytics and assurance systems to achieve:

• More accurate detection: Improve the accuracy of automated problem and anomaly detection within and across network domains.
• Faster resolution: Correlate events to clearly detect and describe the most likely root cause of problems and anomalies.
• Automated Policy Management – Identify devices, applications, and trends and provide recommended policy updates.
• Fewer degradations: Identify patterns and trends and provide contextual information that speeds proactive, corrective and preventive action.
• Peer Intelligence – Provide intelligence and analytics that help network administrators compare their network performance against global, industry, or regional benchmarks.

Bottom Line: Improving Business Resiliency with an Advanced Network Platform

Disruptive events will continue to challenge us and our networks throughout our careers. It's time to rethink how your network strategy enables your business resiliency strategy; prioritize new networking capabilities to stay ahead of the next big thing.

The AI-enabled automation and insights offered by intent-based networks provide a powerful platform to help adapt in any circumstance. They offer the agility, security, intelligence, and speed needed to support resiliency for:

• Workforce: Provide workers with secure business-class performance and access to their applications while working from home, the office, and anywhere in between
• Workplace: Allow employees to safely return to the office with Wi-Fi enabled monitoring, alerts and insights
• Workload: Facilitate multi-cloud resiliency models and protect data and applications wherever workloads reside in public clouds and on-premises data centers.
• Operations: Automating end-to-end network segmentation and policy and simplifying administrative tasks while improving visibility, reducing alerts, and enabling faster remediation.

In this next normal, it's about having a network that can adapt to support whatever the future holds. As you think about your business resiliency strategy, consider how your network can be a key enabler of that strategy.

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/enterprise-networks/2021-networking-report.pdf