With respect to hybrid networks that are more cloud-connected, expansive, and more complicated than ever, the mindset of BetOps managers at the device level is not sufficiently geared towards preventing network outages and maintaining strategic service delivery capabilities. The company needs an ongoing assessment of service delivery.
What is NetOps and why is network monitoring important? Below we will discuss more about this, including how to think strategically to get a secure and smooth network.
What is NetOps?
NetOps is an approach to network operations that prioritizes agility and fast deployment. This approach combines techniques such as automation, virtualization, and orchestration. Today’s digital companies need to be more agile than ever to keep up with customer expectations. Continuous network automation and validation are designed to simplify network operations to improve availability and drive agility and innovation. This is what NetOps does.
How do we know when the corporate network is working? Ask the network operations manager (NetOps) and they will probably provide info on the status of all network infrastructure components in operation. After that, the NetOps manager might proceed with the info that the network is active when all those devices are reachable. However, this is an old-fashioned way of thinking about network performance.
In today’s digital-centric world, the success of a network must be determined by the infrastructure’s ability to deliver critical business services. A company’s long list of application-specific design, compliance, and use cases each has a specific set of needs that need to be reviewed from top to bottom simultaneously. Without this, we will lose track of the things that really matter.
For example, a network that works well for e-commerce may not work well for VoIP traffic or a network that allows high-performance data access. In addition, it can also cause a major attack on the network.
How is NetOps implemented in companies?
In some cases, NetOps can be adopted through technology. For example, tools originally designed to help automate workflows have been upgraded to include network operations in the process. These tools allow IT teams to make configuration changes and update devices automatically.
However, NetOps is not only applied through technology alone. NetOps represents a mindset that may require a cultural change to be fully implemented. For example, the developer team and the network team often clash. The developer team prioritizes robust applications and rapid deployment, while the networking team prioritizes availability, reliability, and capacity.
Ultimately, it is the company that determines the long list of network operational parameters that must be maintained simultaneously. These parameters include the implementation of certain types of security profiles, the ability to maintain a certain level of throughput for each deployed application, and so on.
It turns out that the “working” network has many shades of gray, depending on the context of the question. In the digitally connected business as it is today, a “working” network is one that allows all the applications and services needed by the business to be fulfilled successfully.
A more strategic approach to NetOps
In addition to updating their approach, it is important for network operations managers to rethink what processes are needed to improve support plans without the typically associated labor costs, to be more proactive in preventing power outages, and to ensure that network-induced business risks are not incurred, or at least low.
Here’s a more strategic approach to NetOps:
1. Identify Goals
When trying to refocus the work of a NetOps manager through the lens of service delivery assessment, NetOps must first determine what services the network is trying to provide. In other words, what are the needs of the company’s stakeholders for the network? This often means maintaining a certain level of performance for a particular application, maintaining certain security and design compliance standards, as well as resistance to problems through a well-designed failover architecture.
Under each of these broad categories, there are other levels of detail that affect service delivery. For example, applications such as voice-over IP require certain conditions to be met for calls to sound clear. No matter what architecture is used, NetOps must constantly verify through extensive assessment that the network delivers the services and capabilities it needs.
2. Start by making Baselining
The first step for NetOps is to identify the expected network behavior or baselining required for each application service. Articulating the desired behavior as defined by all operational groups across the application is critical, as is being able to create a comprehensive list of behaviors to assess.
Once the basic expectations are well understood, it remains only to verify or assess the desired behavior against the actual network in real-time. Previously, this step often failed when the network was too large, too distributed, or lacked clear visibility into the various components and public clouds.
3. Add Some Automation
No-code network automation is a requirement for continuous assessment mode. Why? The short answer is scale. Usually NetOps managers know how to manually assess the network once. But of course, this work will be very difficult to complete manually every time, because it requires technical personnel and spends a lot of time.
NetOps teams and budgets have not been able to keep up with this scale and complexity. As a result, a NetOps or network security team is unlikely to manually check every time an application service delivery is required, verify the configuration of hundreds of routers, switches, or firewalls, or test that all infrastructure is fine.
Therefore, automation is needed. automating in-depth and continuous assessment across the network is of strategic importance to optimize NetOps performance and have a major impact on enterprise networks.
The Need To Think Strategically For NetOps
Often times, NetOps only focus on results that do not fit the needs of the networking business. The result is a scenario in which operational tasks are successfully executed, but the change generates a series of unintended consequences. The service delivery assessment approach eliminates the disconnect between problems, services, remediation, and business objectives.
Large-scale continuous network assessment simplifies and lowers network operating costs and keeps network operations aligned with the needs of the business itself. Therefore, it is important to use a network monitoring application that has proven its quality, such as Netmonk.With its superior product, Netmonk Prime, this service provides network monitoring application services, web/API monitoring, and server monitoring. Has been trusted by various large companies in Indonesia, just visit the Netmonk website for more info.
