The Growing Threat Landscape
Threat actors are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their skills, improve their breach success rates, and gain access to organisations’ data. To counter these threats, companies must adapt their approach to IT operations (ITOps) by utilising AI to ensure they are well-equipped to withstand the latest threats and protect their organisation.
The Complexity of IT Environments
IT environments and networks have become increasingly complex. Factors such as hybrid and multi-cloud systems create diverse data silos, necessitating the ability to link disparate sources of data across security and network domains. Additionally, the volume and scale of data being generated have grown exponentially, making it more challenging to monitor and respond to potential threats.
Cloud Complexity and Network Challenges
As a result, many IT teams struggle with daily operations, incident management, hardware failure, human errors, and an overall lack of visibility. They are often unable to gain a proactive understanding of the health of their network. Driven by the cloud, networks now incorporate large numbers of connected devices and IoT sensors, carrying vast amounts of traffic, increasingly to and from cloud applications. This makes network monitoring more important and more challenging than ever before.
The Role of AIOps in Network Monitoring
Organisations are turning to AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) and tools that can proactively observe, predict, and respond to threats on the network as they occur. These tools provide meaningful insights and a clear understanding of the network status, driving improved performance and allowing for proactive forecasting with context-based intelligent anomaly detection to prevent issues.
AIOps for Optimal User Experience
AIOps tools enhance efficiency by seamlessly integrating with IT management tools, enabling proactive issue identification and streamlining IT management processes. More importantly, they optimise an organisation’s network by improving the performance, efficiency, and dependability of its network resources to ensure an optimal user experience.
The Importance of SD-WAN
When it comes to infrastructure, many organisations now rely on SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) to manage and optimise data traffic across different types of networks efficiently. SD-WAN is an effective way to connect the organisation and provide users with application access. It helps businesses improve their network performance, cut costs, and be more flexible by easily connecting to various network types.
The Limitations of Legacy SD-WAN Solutions
However, legacy SD-WAN solutions often fail to identify network problems ahead of time, requiring IT teams to take corrective action post disruptions. This is where AIOps can help by leveraging machine learning and data analysis to proactively monitor network performance, detect anomalies, predict potential issues, and automatically optimise traffic routing across different network paths. AIOps can improve application performance and ensure a better user experience by making intelligent decisions based on real-time data analysis across the SD-WAN infrastructure.
AIOps and the Need for Automation
AIOps tools use information extracted from SD-WAN systems to autonomously resolve issues without human intervention. In other words, AIOps tools utilise predictive analytics to forecast future events or outcomes related to network operations. This makes the whole system run smoother and more reliably, while machine learning algorithms use historical data to make predictions and proactively improve the performance of critical applications.
Challenges with Traditional SD-WAN Solutions
Traditional SD-WAN solutions often depend on manual configurations, which can give rise to issues when it comes to AIOps. AIOps is more challenging to achieve in SD-WAN environments because SD-WAN differs in how it connects multiple network circuits together, with traffic moving between circuits all the time.
The Need for Advanced AIOps Tools
Not all AIOps tools are created equal, and many typical monitoring tools are very complicated. Therefore, IT and network teams need a simple, single interface to help them be more proactive and enable rapid issue identification and resolution.
Selecting the Right AIOps Solution
So, how do organisations avoid adding more complexity to already complex systems when selecting an AIOps solution, without driving a further need for more specialist skills and expertise? They need an advanced AIOps solution for SD-WAN that takes a holistic approach and looks at the interconnectedness of multi-vendor IT systems to understand network traffic in its entirety. This means if a device changes, it can monitor this in a more holistic way and understand whether there is an impact on the network, dynamically prioritising specific business-critical network applications and resources.
Key Features of an Advanced AIOps Tool
In short, organisations need an advanced AIOps tool for their SD-WAN environment that:
- Improves Time to Resolution: Including the time to diagnose faults and the time to repair any problems.
- Reduces Ticket Volumes and Alert Fatigue: Through intelligent alerting and proactive anomaly detection.
- Correlates Network Events: Based on its ability to learn baseline network patterns, predicts issues and capacity shortages before they happen.
- Delivers a Clear Understanding of User Experience: Enabling network teams to understand the health of the network, including the end-to-end performance and the ability to forecast and predict future issues.
Decades of AI Learning and Applied Knowledge
With a clear understanding of the network status, network teams are better positioned to diagnose and resolve issues and improve the mean time to resolution, while delivering an enhanced user experience and reduced ticket volumes due to intelligent alerting. At Xalient, our advanced AIOps solution, MARTINA, incorporates over a decade of Xalient’s expertise, specialism, and knowledge, which we have poured into developing the solution to help organisations manage and secure their SD-WAN environments.
The Future of Cloud and SD-WAN Environments
Today’s cloud and SD-WAN environments will only become more complex as cloud accounts and applications continue to grow. Gartner predicts that annual public cloud spend will exceed $550 billion, with 25% of that spend allocated to handling cloud complexity. This is where an advanced AIOps solution can keep organisations one step ahead of any issues, while maintaining a competitive advantage by optimising their SD-WAN and reducing any risks to the business.
Article Written by Stephen Amstutz, Director of Innovation at Xalient.
Stephen is a results-driven, hardworking professional, capable of understanding complex matters outside his area of direct expertise. He has over 20 years’ experience in design, implementation, and support of various IT infrastructures. Stephen is responsible for all technical pre-sales for Xalient. This involves designing a whole, end-to-end solution to meet the customer’s needs, potentially including everything from networks and server infrastructure to applications and business processes.
