According to IDC, to get the most out of SD-WAN, organizations should enhance it with analytics and automation to provide valuable insights and improve security.
“SD-WAN plays an important role in almost everything an enterprise wants to do, from supporting distributed applications or multi-cloud applications to providing on-ramp to public cloud backbones and site-to-site or site-to-multisite Connectivity Cases Used,” Brandon Butler, practice research manager for enterprise networking at IDC, spoke at a Cisco-sponsored webinar this week.
“Enterprises want to have an SD-WAN platform that not only tells you insights about what’s going on at the SD-WAN management level, but also drills down to the underlying layer that can help you understand if there’s something that’s impacting user core data source,” Butler said. “So it’s increasingly important to have an observability platform that supports analytics and spans all these different points in the network.”
SD-WAN relies on interactions with cloud services, so it’s important to analyze these interactions to optimize them. “Network analytics solutions are necessary to increase visibility and control over cloud services, resources, connections, and application performance,” IDC said in a recent report titled “Analytics and Automation: Driving SD-WAN Success at the Network Edge.” wrote.
The main benefit of analytics is that they provide telemetry details that can be used to drive automation, said Mark Leary, research director for IDC’s Network Analytics and Automation practice.
“Automation uses analytics to enable more precise operations and relieve operators of the burden of having to do things minute by minute,” Leary said. “Business IT leaders want their employees to focus on the big picture—what’s coming, what has a greater impact on the business—rather than deploying equipment or configuring software or constantly chasing problems.”
IDC found that enterprises connect observability with automation. In its 2022 Global Survey on Observability and IT Management, more than 75% of respondents said they are using or plan to use observability intelligence and insights to support their automation efforts. In another 2021 study focused on network automation, IDC said more successful organizations are using analytics to drive their network automation efforts, allowing them to realize greater returns than organizations that simply automate repetitive tasks. .
“Combining analytics with automation enables SD-WAN environments to easily and reliably respond to traffic changes, issues, security threats, and new workloads while minimizing staff requirements,” IDC said.
Another key issue with analytics using SD-WAN systems is the ability to improve security and mitigate threats.
“As organizations look to security to be more integrated with their networks, visibility and analytics play an important role by providing insights into the users and devices on the network and the applications they are accessing,” Leary said. “It’s the ability to identify which users and what applications they are accessing.” The underlying information that devices are allowed on the network [and] what applications they are allowed to access to set policies. These observability platforms really provide the underlying information that can really provide a security posture on top of the edge of the enterprise network.”
Converging security and network controls has another benefit: making NetOps and SecOps work more together.
“IDC research shows that one of the major permanent changes to IT operations triggered by the pandemic is a closer connection between NetOps and SecOps,” IDC said. “This change has resulted in organizational alignment, common tool selection, increased sharing of management data and process improvements. Advancing the development and adoption of SD-WAN technology will certainly be driven by tighter coupling of systems and people to support a secure connected environment at the edge of the network. Detailed network intelligence and insights are critical in driving the acceptance and adoption of joint network and security efforts. It plays an important role in effectiveness.”
All core SD-WAN vendors, including Cisco, Juniper, VMware, Extreme, and Palo Alto, support some analytics and automation components.
“SD-WAN requirements create multiple challenges for Cisco and other vendors looking to leverage analytics and automation at the evolving network edge,” IDC said.
“Comprehensive and timely network intelligence from on-premises systems and public cloud/communication services is critical to accurately analyze conditions and components and can lead to precise automated operations. This analysis and automation must be enhanced with AI/ML development, AI /ML development is focused not only on improving accuracy and precision today, but also on improving employee productivity and predictive analytics for the future,” IDC said.