Despite networks being an innate part of almost every business, too many organizations take a ‘one and done’ approach to their infrastructure. But just like enterprises, networks aren’t static entities. Without ongoing optimization and refinement, managing these already complex networks becomes an endless cycle of reactive firefighting – and this comes at a cost to the success of the wider business.
IT, network, and security teams are under serious pressure. When the business needs a connection provisioned yesterday, or a new app has to be working by Monday without fail, speed becomes a greater priority than thorough procedures and robust security measures.
The intention might be there to fully finish deployments and migrations and to fix makeshift solutions, but the right skills and experience are hard to come by – and there’s never any time.
Faced with an endless to-do list, IT teams end up having to prioritize what’s immediately under their noses, like troubleshooting network performance or wading through mountains of security alerts to work out which ones could have serious consequences.
The result is that many organizations are stuck in a middle state where connectivity and security infrastructure has been deployed and is functioning well enough, but that’s where progress has stalled.
However, to maintain a secure, flexible, and cost-effective network and security infrastructure that’s capable of supporting the varied and evolving demands of a growing business, there needs to be a continual and proactive process of review and optimization – and this often isn’t happening.
Without Optimization, Complexity Snowballs Over Time
Enterprise networks are already incredibly convoluted systems, and without ongoing optimization, this only gets worse.
Each change to a network or security system – like modifying the rules of a firewall to make sure a new cloud service works, or adjusting the configuration of a piece of network hardware – takes it further away from its original state, adding to the complexity.
These changes can add up over time, leading to configuration drift. The network no longer looks or functions quite how it was intended to, and it gets harder and harder to predict how it’ll behave when further changes are made.
If documentation isn’t updated – which is often the case, because it’s rarely a top priority – it loses relevance. Knowledge of how the network is configured is now only stored within the heads of key employees, and when they leave, managing the network gets tougher again.
This creates a technical debt that keeps accumulating until network and security infrastructure is so complex that just keeping the lights on takes up most of the IT department’s time and energy. So it’s probably unsurprising that almost half of enterprises believe their technology set-up is more complex than it needs to be, and that this has implications for business confidence and growth.
A Stalled State Degrades Performance and Weakens Security
Effective network and security optimization involves a host of ongoing activities like monitoring, telemetry, analytics, configuration management, policy enforcement, capacity planning, and patching.
Without these, network performance is inconsistent at best, and security vulnerabilities, high latency, traffic bottlenecks, and downtime are much more likely. If backup processes aren’t regularly tested, configuration drift can lead to real-life failover procedures being unsuccessful too.
All this can be catastrophic from an operational and revenue perspective – the cost to enterprises of unplanned outages is estimated to be an average of $9,000 per minute, or $540,000 every hour.
Without Visibility, You Can’t Build in Automation and AI
Complex, fragmented networks tend to suffer from poor visibility. This means performance issues are often spotted too late, once they’re already affecting users. A lack of centralized visibility also makes diagnosing problems incredibly challenging, and leads to teams spending far too much time pinpointing the root cause when issues arise.
It’s also impossible to secure what you can’t see, so network blind spots are potential vulnerabilities. And achieving regulatory compliance without full visibility is arduous at best.
Ironically, poor visibility also stands in the way of implementing new technologies that could make these complex enterprise networks easier to manage.
Manual tasks like managing firewalls, network provisioning, and remediating misconfigurations can take up half the working week for network professionals. Automating repetitive and routine tasks like these can significantly improve network ROI and free up huge amounts of staff time to focus on higher-value work.
But implementing this kind of automation requires a standardized network foundation, joined-up data flows, and comprehensive visibility – all of which are lacking when there’s incomplete deployment and no ongoing optimization.
The problem’s even more pronounced when it comes to AI. Building intelligence into the network promises to overcome complexity and speed up the process of triaging issues, identifying root causes, and rectifying them. But without visibility, a single source of truth, and mature orchestration, AI’s usefulness will inevitably be limited.
Outsourcing Fills Expertise Gaps but Doesn’t Have To Mean Relinquishing Control
With network operations this complex and resource-heavy, it’s not surprising that more than two-thirds of enterprises outsource at least one component of their IT operations to managed service providers, with network monitoring among the top functions.
Outsourcing network and security management involves a level of choice about how much control is handed over to a service provider. It can mean the provider fully managing all aspects of the network, or a co-managed approach where services and policies are jointly controlled by the provider and the customer organization.
Choices about outsourcing to a managed service provider are generally based on:
- What level of resource, skills, and expertise you currently have in-house and feel able to maintain in the future
- How much control you want over your services and policies
- Whether you can keep abreast of new technology developments and maintain the skills to harness them
- How confident you feel about adhering to clear architectural, compliance, and operational frameworks and keeping documentation up to date
Smaller organizations with limited IT resources, for example, might choose a fully managed option. Large enterprises that are subject to strict regulations and need a high level of customization, on the other hand, might choose a DIY approach and keep network management fully in-house.
In this case, significant investment in people, skills, and a breadth of experience is essential, which is why many enterprises opt for a co-managed arrangement instead. This allows them to retain a level of control but gives them access to the wide range of skills needed to optimize complex network and security infrastructure, like network and cloud architecture, network and AIOps engineering, SecOps, and data science expertise.
Managed Service Providers Help Put the Groundwork in for Business-Focused Infrastructure
This is how a managed provider helps tackle incomplete deployments and network complexity:
- Centralization: Implementing effective SD-WAN and SASE frameworks to centralize policies and change management processes, and allow network and security to be managed from a single orchestration platform, rather than updating rules and policies by site, vendor, or network segment
- Standardization: Defining standard frameworks and policies and using automated processes, strict governance, and centralized controls to make sure the network still adheres to them every time changes are made
- Skills: Plugging in-house skills gaps, offering extra resources, and providing access to broad and up-to-date expertise
- Auditing and records: Auditing devices regularly, maintaining accurate inventories and documentation, and making sure configuration drift is detected and mitigated early
- Visibility: Integrating the data needed for analytics, AI, and effective decision-making from disparate tools, services, and systems into a single platform
This eliminates blind spots and allows clear visibility into the assets that make up network and security infrastructure, how they’re performing, and where there are capacity issues or inefficiencies.
This informs more strategic and proactive infrastructure management and decision-making. But critically, it also creates the foundation for further and ongoing optimization in the shape of automation and intelligence – not just limited, localized adoption, but deployments that provide genuine value by reliably spanning workflows, tools, and systems.
With these technologies in place, it’s simpler and less time-consuming to manage network and security infrastructure. Issues can be identified and tackled faster before they hit users, and the network can be made more cost-effective.
But that’s not where the potential ends. Intelligent, highly automated networking and security systems are the basis of a more sophisticated, responsive enterprise infrastructure – one that can anticipate and accommodate the needs of the organization instantly, and can automatically translate business intent into policies, configuration, and performance management.
Network Optimization Isn’t Just About the IT Team – It’s About the Future of the Business
Many companies believe that deployment is the real work when it comes to enterprise networks, but in reality, ongoing management is where the heavy lifting really starts.
Without dedicated and effective optimization, the business impact is twofold – not only does network and security performance degrade and become harder to maintain, but it’s impossible to implement the intelligence and automation that turn the network into a responsive foundation for organizational change and growth.
Business evolution never stops, but the organizations that will succeed are the ones that approach the network as a dynamic operation that needs ongoing investment and prioritization, rather than treating it as a box to be ticked.