The impact of hybrid IT environments on NetOps professionals

Hybrid work models are driving a major shift in network configuration and architecture. According to Microsoft's 2021 Work Trends Index, more than 70% of employees want flexible remote work options. With the rapid growth of video conferencing and collaboration platforms, the burden on the network is more important than ever. In fact, the 2021 Workplace Collaboration Global Study found that successful companies are significantly more likely to invest in expanded internet access, Wi-Fi upgrades, WAN services, SD-WAN, and internet improvements. In addition to the security issues associated with this technology shift, network performance is a top concern as employees work in random locations and using any number of devices.

As a result, it places greater demands on network visibility, connectivity, and agility. As enterprises move more to the cloud and leverage technologies like SaaS, SD-WAN, and NFV, NetOps teams are tasked with ensuring performance and resolving issues quickly. But the combination of this traditional on-premises network and the cloud can make this a daunting task. So, what are some of the challenges NetOps teams face as they try to meet the growing demands of remote workers and hybrid network environments? Here are some key questions.

[[425805]]

Fusion of tradition and new technology

As traditional networks are layered on software-defined technologies like SD-WAN, visibility across the entire network is critical. When performance degrades, people often blame the new technology or new parts of the network. Without visibility, it’s hard to plan migrations or even identify problems when they occur.

For example, let’s look at SD-WAN, which completely changes the way traffic is routed. The traditional direct-connect model may have reliability that’s easy to track. But SD-WAN may use alternate paths, and if there’s a bad policy (or a bad centralized policy), traffic may be routed through a branch office that wasn’t intended to be a transit point (like a small branch office with a 25Mbps connection). The result is a poor network experience for remote workers. It gets even more complicated if an organization is cataloging hundreds or thousands of sites—a mix of traditional WAN and SD-WAN—and tracking how they communicate with each other. NetOps teams must have a network visibility platform that can see traditional WAN, cloud, and software-defined traffic.

Work and collaborate anywhere

Remote workers need to be able to collaborate and access applications from anywhere. This could be on-premises in a private data center or in a public cloud (or the application could be dynamic in different regions, with the application in the cloud but the data hosted on-premises). For the end user, the application just needs to work. This means that applications are often no longer fully controlled by the enterprise. However, being able to see the performance impact of these cloud (or SaaS) applications is important to meeting user needs. And it’s important to understand not only how traffic is moving from a company’s location to places like AWS or Azure, but also how it’s performing for remote users.

Traditionally, this kind of visibility has been difficult to achieve, but today, enterprises can give remote users managed devices that sit in a direct line of sight to the network or track performance based on access to data centers or cloud workloads. But this also means an increase in non-traditional workflows for remote users. When these workflows break down, identifying the problem creates a demand for network monitoring tools that help manage performance.

Migrate it all quickly

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly put pressure on NetOps teams to quickly support remote work. It has also put pressure on enterprises to change their business models to keep pace with change, for example, around new retail models. Productivity in most businesses is tied to being on the cutting edge of technology. But when migrating networks, for example, to incorporate SD-WAN, you need visibility into performance to set critical baselines. It’s important to understand what applications are on the network (and which ones to prioritize), which are the most important talking points, and which sites are using the most bandwidth. This requires traditional capacity planning.

Without historical data, it’s impossible to understand good and bad results post-migration. This is even more critical when looking at voice performance in relation to SD-WAN’s application-aware routing policies. And, once migrated, the policy needs to be reviewed to ensure it meets performance standards. Cloud migration is similar, but it’s important to consider bandwidth allocation, as well as understand how much data is coming from the cloud.

Segment your network for security

Moving to hybrid working brings with it all kinds of security challenges. But from a hybrid network perspective, segmentation is important to isolate various resources like IoT from business-critical applications or guest users from corporate users. In SD-WAN, this is often done through the concept of VRFs, which is basically a way to segment different parts of the network. For example, guests might be in VRF 1 and corporate users in VRF 2. NetOps can look at the top users and talkers within each and see if they are talking to each other. This can then be reported on to see if this is an acceptable policy or action.

This is also done through multiple levels of macro and micro segmentation. For example, there could be a macro segmentation of IoT, with micro segments of IoT types underneath, such as HVAC and video surveillance. Or more broadly HR and R&D resources. Network monitoring tools can give you this level of segment visibility.

Over the past 16 months, NetOps teams have faced increasing pressure to deliver unprecedented levels of network performance and reimagine what enterprise networks can look like. Understanding the key challenges or issues that come with this transformation is key to properly planning for possible challenges.