The rapid rise in cloud adoption and smaller, edge data centers makes it more vital and challenging to ensure network resilience. Here, Todd Rychecky, VP of Americas at Opengear, outlines the best practices to fortify networks against disruptions, outages, and breaches amidst the rapidly evolving landscape.Â
As cloud adoption continues to rise, alongside IoT and other connected innovations, enterprises and cloud providers alike are beginning to experience a new and increasing need for resilient infrastructure. This infrastructure must not only support high scalability requirements for increased capacity but will also need to facilitate more complex edge-heavy networks.Â
Central to this shift is an unprecedented burst of new technologies altering our world. Automated capabilities, next-gen business analytics, and a plethora of more efficient processes will depend on faster-localized processing speeds at the edge. These requirements, alongside other factors, will drive implementations of swiftly deployable, smaller data centers to support more distributed cloud usage, where cloud services are dispersed to various physical locations over a public cloud.Â
While a new model of drastically increased distributed cloud usage will reduce latency and enable countless new capabilities, it will also require a more robust network to support geographically dispersed endpoints. Each of them also presents a unique potential point of failure. Â
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A New Standard of Network Resilience
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly one third Opens a new window of all organizations lost $1 million or more to network outages each year. The costs of downtime will only become more severe as organizations and users increasingly depend on more dispersed network nodes and near-zero latency.Â
Imagine the frustration you experience when a video call disconnects or even when the audio lags. This type of disruption becomes much more severe – and even harder to prevent – with advanced processes like self-driving cars, remote surgery and even our increased reliance on remote work, all of which require data centers miles apart to run flawlessly.
An optimal network resilience strategy that reduces downtime and mean time to recovery (MTTR) will be more pivotal than ever before. And those who neglect such a strategy may be unable to innovate while still staying operational or servicing their customers adequately. Here are a few elements to include in a network resilience strategy for 2021 and beyond. Â
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Establish an Independent Network Management Plane
With networks and users becoming more distributed, many organizations should stop managing their networks on the same connection as their primary production network processing user data. This exposes network management to the same attacks and glitches impacting users and can lead to network management being locked out or compromised during events like a cyber-security breach, a faulty software update, or a failure to handle network traffic Opens a new window surges.
Setting up a secure, separate line for network management, also known as out-of-band (OOB) managementOpens a new window , does not have to be a cumbersome project. Instead, it can be done simply via a cellular LTE connection that requires minimal startup and can be made highly secure with a few security precautions, such as using IPsec VPN tunnels and other protocols.
By deploying a separate network management connection, technicians and admins can reach any core or edge node in a network, no matter what the current status of the production network is. With little effort, this can significantly improve the ability to check on devices’ status to prevent issues, and it can enable better real-time problem resolution to improve recovery time.Â
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Don’t Wait, Automate
More edge-heavy networks will mean the price of downtime and truck rolls will rise alongside the number of network vulnerabilities. To improve overall resilience and prepare for network requirements of the future, organizations should already be taking crucial steps like shifting from command-line interface to NetOps automation.Â
The introduction of NetOps automation will lay the foundation for smart capabilities like AI-powered methods of self-management and healing, threat identification and recovery, low latency remote monitoring and provisioning, and more. These tools will be invaluable for preventing outages in dispersed locations and quickly remediating smaller data centers at remote locations.Â
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Make Secure, Remote Deployments Easier
Though cost restrictions, physical lockdowns, or other factors may make it difficult or impossible to get engineers onsite, expansion and upgrades will still be needed. This is especially true for new edge and data center deployments or cloud migrations.Â
Cumbersome methods of managing these deployments will no longer be viable. This will push organizations to become more scalable via tools for secure, remote implementations, such as TPM chips that prevent hardware tampering and zero-touch provisioning capabilities.Â
Once solutions are implemented, organizations will then need to consider how to re-provision equipment remotely. For instance, new virtualized networking tools at the edge may involve complex software stacks that require extra troubleshooting or updates.Â
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Secure Your Infrastructure for Today, and Tomorrow
2020 brought many new disruptions, but it also expedited the industry toward changes that were already in motion, such as the rise in cloud usage and the need for more edge deployments. While businesses may still face new, unexpected challenges, they must also prepare their network infrastructure for new innovations.
A few simple steps like rolling out a separate network management plane, introducing NetOps automation, and enabling rapid and secure remote deployments can go a long way toward helping organizations maintain service levels while preparing for new and expanding technologies like IoT.Â
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