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OPINION: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OVERSIGHT ABOVE I.T. TRANSFORMATION EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT TRANSFORMATION IN THE I.T. SPACE, BUT DO PROFESSIONALS HAVE COMPLETE VISIBILITY AS TO WHICH DEVICES, SYSTEMS AND APPLICATIONS ARE UNDERGOING THIS PROCESS? MAT CLOTHIER, CEO AT CLOUDHOUSE GIVES US HIS TAKE Digital transformation is nothing new, but we are living through a period of particularly rapid change. Internal and external factors have combined to accelerate this trend. The Covid pandemic brought with it a seismic shift in the way people work and consume products, and this change is here to stay. Enterprises are busy making positive changes, driven by a desire to provide best levels of service to customers and ensure the business remains fully compliant and resilient in the face of change. COMPLEXITIES OF THE CLOUD Arguably the biggest transformation still playing out in the IT industry is moving to the cloud, with predictions that the global cloud computing market will continue to grow at pace to the end of 2028, as small and medium enterprises make their migration and businesses seek to improve efficiency with the adoption of advanced technologies such as big data, AI and machine learning. Using multiple cloud providers has become the standard for many organisations, with 80% using both public and private clouds in a hybrid model. The hybrid model offers agility and competitive advantage, but having your IT estate spread out in this way can create its own problems. Maintaining oversight of all parts of the estate is essential for resilience but can prove complex and time consuming in practice. While human resources in the business are busy working on positive change, it's as crucial to ensure that technology can enable monitoring of those developments. With so much at stake, monitoring is essential to minimise disruption and ensure a seamless customer experience. It is also an important element in making sure regulatory standards and compliance are maintained. The risks of breaching regulatory compliance, with the potential consequences of legal action and fines, as well as reputational damage, are well documented. For example, data for 2021 shows that data breach costs rose to an average total of $4.24 million, the highest ever recorded - but the same report noted that costs were significantly higher for organisations that lagged in areas such as security AI and automation and cloud security. And the costs are not just financial: there is huge potential for reputational damage. For those operating in highly regulated industries, such as finance and healthcare, the consequences of breaching regulatory compliance can be even more severe. OVERSIGHT TOOLKIT CTOs and CIOs, now more than ever, need to keep on top of their IT transformation, monitor change and have full oversight of their estates. Being across so many things at once can be daunting and laborious, especially for those working with a matrix management structure. So how can they best achieve oversight? This is where configuration management tools come to the fore. These tools give a toplevel overview - a clear and unambiguous assessment of every element of the full suite - all in one place, and can find and fix compliance and change management issues quickly. They allow omnipresence, facilitating best practice oversight over even the most complex transformation projects. Having all this information in one easy-toaccess place also makes it easier to bring teams together - particularly beneficial for those working with a matrix management structure. You won't miss a thing. Change management is made simple as the tools look at the different environments across the estate and compare them, giving full transparency on where you are on the journey to migration. They allow oversight of the tracking, testing and deployment of updates, pre-empting issues before they arise. What's more, they work across server, desktop and network as well as multiple vendors, making them ideal for those working with hybrid cloud systems, giving full peace of mind. Management tools not only identify issues when they happen: they can also provide a further layer of protection by allowing CTOs and CIOs to take full control by setting policies and permissions to pre-empt compliance problems before they occur. Policies can be created or selected from the Center for Internet Security's 20 critical security controls, which satisfy regulatory requirements like PCI and SOX. This means companies can automatically achieve compliance by setting policies according to best practice configuration. The automated health checks offered by configuration management tools act as an early warning system, building a company's resilience by allowing them to act fast not just when problems crop up, but by catching misconfigurations before they can be exploited. Configuration management tools are a powerful addition to the CTO and CIO toolkit. NC 14 NETWORKcomputing AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2022 @NCMagAndAwards WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK
OPINON: NETWORK DOWNTIME DOWNTIME DOLDRUMS AND SMART SOLUTIONS ALAN STEWART-BROWN, VP EMEA AT OPENGEAR CONSIDERS THE TOP TRENDS FOR NETWORKS THAT WANT TO STAY ONE STEP AHEAD OF DOWNTIME With hybrid working now becoming the strategy of choice for numerous businesses, many have had to undertake a re-evaluation of their network infrastructure to facilitate collaboration and productivity while at home and in the office. However, the road to integrated networks has proven to be a bumpy ride. As more firms leverage IoT and smart devices, this increases the risk of disruptive downtime due to the increased strain on networks. So what trends are allowing businesses and their engineers to effectively escape the downtime doldrums? THE CONSTANT THREAT TO UPTIME Network outages are nothing new, but in 2021, downtime managed to impact some of the largest enterprises in the world. Even social media giant Meta was impacted globally for almost six hours over two days in October 2021, affecting access to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. While detrimental to the technology firm, it also had ramifications for the people and businesses around the world that rely on its services. The biggest causes of downtime for enterprises will typically be software upgrades gone wrong, cyber attacks or misconfiguration errors, such as when writing a configuration file. The issue is also compounded by the widespread adoption of IoT devices. Due to constant connectivity being needed, any outage will also affect these endpoints. Content delivery networks (CDNs) are also under sharp focus due to their role in improving site performance and user experience. Software configuration updates can trigger bugs in such systems and lead to severe disruption. In a handful of cases, natural disasters can prove catastrophic to intercontinental global data traffic, proving the fragility of the interconnected world. However, with correctly chosen solutions, businesses are able to manage their infrastructure remotely and securely, minimising downtime as much as possible. With today's network challenges, organisations require access to advanced technologies to streamline their operations and agile tools to provide insights into virtualised environments. KEEPING DOWNTIME AT BAY At the core of keeping downtime at a minimum is an independent management plane, which essentially allows engineering teams to roll-back or undo any inadvertently uptime-threatening actions. This is part of a wider Smart Out-of-Band management setup, which unlike In-Band solutions, allows network engineers to securely connect to remote equipment during an outage. Engineers can then also lock down the most critical functions on the production network to prevent access from other users. Smart Out-of-Band interfaces can also be paired with Failover to Cellular. These capabilities use 4G LTE, so in the case of disruption, engineers can leverage bandwidth to access critical applications when undergoing issue remediation, even when the primary network is down. This bandwidth not only provides the remote access to determine the root cause of an outage, but also acts as a path for remote site production network traffic, ensuring network resilience. TOWARDS NETOPS AUTOMATION Another aspect of maintaining uptime is via the adoption of a NetOps approach for growing, virtualised environments. Across the hybrid workforce, it's more important than ever for enterprises to be able to automate certain processes, such as the testing of network processes for latency purposes or securely provisioning new sites. NetOps makes this possible, with a growing awareness of its benefits among businesses and IT departments. The NetOps approach provides advantages such as upskilling and business efficiency, with opportunities for employees to build programming skills in Python and understanding of Docker containers, plus other commonly used toolsets such as Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Together with the independent management plane, NetOps automation ultimately helps reduce the threat of downtime and ensures business continuity. KEEPING THE NETWORK UP AND RUNNING Outages ultimately lead to organisations losing money and can have a significant impact on industry reputation. The hybrid working era has required businesses to be more agile and offer a network that's secure, connected, and scalable for employees to benefit, regardless of where they are based. To ensure downtime is kept to a minimum, enterprises need to be proactive in securing their network resilience with trending technologies such as the independent management plane, Smart Out-of-Band technologies and NetOps to ensure optimum business continuity and keep the network up and running. NC WWW.NETWORKCOMPUTING.CO.UK AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 15 NETWORKcomputing @NCMagAndAwards
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