NC1801

NETWORKEXPERT
to tape and taking it home. There's a lot to consider: public cloud or on-premise and country-specific legislation will strongly influence the decision.
As with everything, cost cannot be ignored and value must be sought. Richard again, "Sometimes the most expensive recovery product isn't what you
need. Reviewing your data before you buy means you won't waste budget on unnecessary functionality. Place ease-of-use high on your agenda."
Clearly, by planning ahead and creating a robust recovery strategy you'll not only have the capability, but you'll also know exactly what to do when you
need to recover data. The last word goes to Richard: "Don't forget to regularly test your data recovery strategy; you might never need it, but when you do,
you simply can't afford for it to fail."
Everything that we have covered in the A to Z of networking can itself be considered as
providing network and business resilience. R is for Resilience. Network resilience is one aspect
of overall organisational resilience and it is increasingly important to organisations that rely on
network connectivity to link operational resources, including branch offices and remote locations.
The Internet of Things is driving complexity to the network edge, creating an expectation of alwayson
availability throughout the estate, an expectation previously confined to the data centre.
Thomas Wang, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Opengear explains that "As a result, network
administrators are tasked to design and build networks to provide 100 per cent uptime.
Unfortunately this monumental task is expensive, both in terms of equipment and resources, and it's
extremely difficult to achieve. With reduced staffing, smaller budgets and increased business
demand, it's a challenge for IT organisations to build a reliable, cost effective and scalable network.
In addition, situations such as equipment failure, power surges or natural disasters, all of which are
beyond the control of network administrators, can disrupt the network."
Redundancy has traditionally been one method of maintaining network connectivity during critical
failure. However, operating on a redundant network can limit connectivity to certain systems or impose a lower overall quality of service on users, as
well as adversely impacting revenue.
Thomas concludes by saying, "Resilience empowers the network administrators through enhanced tools to quickly track down problems and resolve
them and restore primary network functionality. Out-of-band management is a common approach to strengthen network resilience. It provides a direct
line to network infrastructure for diagnosis, reboot or reconfiguration. This enables quick remote identification and resolution, which prevents serious
problem escalation. Even with total hardware failure administrators can remotely diagnose issues and decide if it's necessary to despatch personnel to
replace faulty equipment, minimising business disruption and reducing resolution time."
Moving the definition and executive control of systems from hardware to software has in
my view been one of the most unrecognised IT and networking innovations to date. Its
reach continues to grow, and the significant interest in this powerful capability will
quietly dominate 2018.
S is for Software-defined Perimeter. The software-defined Perimeter (SD-P) is a way of
connecting and securing IoT devices to an organisation's network. Organisations are facing two
changing paradigms; firstly the growing presence of IoT, and secondly the need to enable
employee mobility. Hubert da Costa, VP & GM EMEA at Cradlepoint adds, "At the same time,
the IT team can no longer depend on a tightly controlled perimeter to keep the network secure.
This shift makes it much more complex to provide users and devices with controlled but efficient
access to company files, data and applications served in the cloud and at the data centre.
It is becoming clear that SD-P addresses many of the new networking challenges that legacy
WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK @NCMagAndAwards
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 NETWORKcomputing 19