Preventing Outages: The Best Defense Is a Resilient Network

Ensuring optimal network performance with minimized disruptions has never been more critical and challenging. In this article, Opengear’s VP of Americas, Todd Rychecky, outlines how a proactive network resilience strategy is the best way to fortify networks against outages, breaches, and disruptions.     

It is undeniable: remote work and virtual tools are the imminent future for all workplace collaboration, presenting exciting new opportunities for service and solutions providers catering to this need. However, they are also creating new challenges and frustrations for those tasked with managing networks. In just the past few months alone, we’ve seen major outages from some of the largest collaboration software vendors – from Google to Slack to Zoom – who’ve suffered from faulty updates and programming while trying to accommodate rapid work from home traffic surges. 

Don’t expect this trend to slow as we move into 2021. In fact, expect it to accelerate.

Even before COVID-19 drove a worldwide shift to virtual environments, the unified communications and collaboration market grew by over 17%Opens a new window between 2018 and 2019, and this trend has been speeding up alongside others like the rise of SD-WAN, IoT, and edge expansion. All of this introduces greater network complexity, more points of failure, and higher recovery costs should an outage occur. 

As the world returns to “normal,” keeping networks up and running and providing remote access will be increasingly vital and challenging to enterprises and ISPs alike. What’s more, the costs of an outage can be extremely high. In fact, a recent Opengear surveyOpens a new window showed that almost 1/3 of organizations lose over $1 million because of network outages each year. These costs are rising every day alongside network complexity. 

A defensive mindset is not enough to prevent catastrophic outages. We often see organizations experience an outage because they are reactive – not proactive – when responding to network threats and issues. To this extent, managing your network and ensuring network resilience, or the ability to maintain and supply optimal service levels under all conditions, requires planning and attention. 

So, what should be considered to ensure proactive end-to-end resilience across a network?

Learn More: Encrypted Traffic Is a Backdoor for Malware — Defend Your Networks Now

Liberate the Management Plane

One of the most common challenges and sources of frustration organizations face today comes from managing their network on the same connection as their primary production network. When this is done, network management can be quickly crippled by any disruption or cyber-security breach impacting control commands and sensitive data. Simply put, it’s a recipe for disaster. 

By deploying a separate network management connection to reach console ports, referred to as out-of-band (OOB) managementOpens a new window , network engineers and admins can connect to any core or edge location of a network, no matter the status of the primary production network. This easy-to-implement precaution can drastically improve the ability to monitor network devices, enable real-time resolution of disruptions, and ultimately ensure that management is never locked out or compromised should a crisis actually occur.

Make OOB More Than a Failsafe and Automate 

As network complexity increases at the core and edge, so will vulnerabilities, points of failure, and costs associated with downtime and truck rolls. Deploying a separate management plane alone might not be sufficient, but new advancements and smart capabilities have made network management simpler, more effective, and more efficient than ever before.

For example, the ability to deploy and quickly fine-tune network automation capabilities is a key factor in reducing human error and streamlining network management. This can be achieved on a separate management plane by including tools that support NetOpsOpens a new window (or DevOps for network management), like Puppet, Ansible, GitHub and Chef for configuration; Kubernetes and Docker for storage; Microsoft Azure, Google and AWS for cloud management; Splunk for monitoring and alerting; and Python and other coding APIs.

By implementing these tools on a separate plane dedicated to network management, organizations can securely and rapidly roll out apps for NetOps Opens a new window automation and always-on remote provisioning. This can bolster security via capabilities like constant event logging with automated smart analysis and alerts and constant updates that always get completed for elements like back-up firmware scripts or images. 

Automation also drastically improves scalability by making new site configuration much simpler. For instance, benefits like zero-touch provisioning enable a secure, remote, and instant method of launching a new site equipped with best-of-breed automation for network management. 

Learn More: When Cloud Is Not Reliable: 4 Tips to Deal With Cloud Outages

Ditch the Tethers – Go Wireless 

A cellular connection for out-of-band management is highly secure when implemented with the right measures to protect data, such as IPsec VPN tunnels and other precautionary protocols. 

Of course, there are other options besides wireless, such as a second Ethernet interface built out for the separate network or using a cable modem. But the fact of the matter is, a cellular network is far-and-wide more flexible and scalable in most cases, especially for networks that are geographically dispersed. 

Using a 4G LTE connection, businesses can also gain access to a host of smart capabilities, including automatic failover, proactive monitoring and alerts, and near-instant remediation.

Cellular can also be set up very quickly, especially when compared to other options. For example, it could take several weeks to completely install an MPLS circuit for your separate management plane, but a cellular connection is extremely easy to implement and can be activated remotely.  

What’s the Hold-Up? 

Though a capable separate network management plane can drastically boost network resilience, many haven’t yet implemented one. To some organizations, the technology’s value is not recognized until a crisis demands it. Others have learned to exist with a legacy OOB server that is not scalable, relies on outdated firmware, or has limited capabilities.

Organizations big and small can become complacent in network resilience. But the trends driving greater traffic from geographically-dispersed workers and data-intensive connected devices are not slowing down anytime soon. Those who act soon will ensure network resilience now and for years to come. Those who don’t act may be scrambling in the face of the inevitable: large outages and business disruptions. 

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