Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By John K. Smith, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for LiveAction
Visualizing the Future of Network Monitoring
Each year, enterprise networks become more complex and challenging to manage. As organizations continue to adopt and rely upon new technologies for business operations, their networks become an increasingly intricate mix of traditional infrastructure, remote sites, Wi-Fi networks, SD-WAN overlays, multi-cloud services and more. Achieving network performance optimization across these hybrid network environments can be incredibly difficult without a clear view of the industry’s latest technology trends, opportunities and cautions, and without the right network performance management solutions in place.
Here are four predictions for the world of networking in 2020 from John Smith, executive vice president and chief technology officer at LiveAction, a leader in network performance management:
1. Blinded By The Light: SD-WANs Take Performance Hits Due to Visibility Blind Spots – The accelerated adoption of SD-WAN technology will not only continue throughout 2020 (with IDC forecasts predicting it will become a $6 billion market by next year), but it will also inevitably create additional network blind spots for NetOps teams. For example, these visibility shortfalls might include how the overlay interacts with and impacts all areas of existing infrastructure, if it is performing as their policies and design intended, potential bandwidth utilization issues across network domains, and more. Organizations that aren’t equipped with the necessary visibility solutions will experience inefficient application routing policies, degraded application performance and more. These types of issues can result in poor performance, negative end-user experiences, and increased troubleshooting and management pressures – all of which eat away at the network agility improvements and the cost and resource savings the SD-WAN was originally deployed to deliver. To get ahead of these potential problems, NetOps teams must leverage unified network monitoring and management solutions like LiveAction’s LiveNX that can help with pre-deployment evaluations and SD-WAN policy design, deployment, verification that the overlay performs as intended, and day-to-day monitoring and optimization of the new system.
2. 5G Creates Capacity Planning Problems – As 5G continues to emerge next year, capacity planning will become more complex and difficult for service providers, managed service providers, and large enterprises to properly execute. Once 5G becomes more broadly adopted, these networks are going to experience a higher traffic load, either directly as a connectivity option for sites or indirectly via an increase in network traffic from data consumed and generated that will hit their cloud. This will put a premium on network monitoring tools that can offer visibility into the 5G/network exchange, and enable effective capacity planning, allocation and monitoring across all portions of the enterprise network – especially in public or private cloud environments where a lot of that data will be consumed and analyzed, or generated.
3. CTOs Make Cloud Visibility a Priority – Cloud adoption was through the roof in 2019 and shows no signs of slowing down in 2020. However, the lack of visibility into cloud infrastructures creates management and monitoring problems for NetOps teams responsible for ensuring end-user experience and network performance. To date, most executives have turned a blind eye to the visibility problem due to the impressive cost savings and ROI. This will begin to shift in 2020 as real cloud visibility problems impact operations. To overcome these challenges, NetOps will increasingly rely on network monitoring solutions that can offer end-to-end visibility and situational awareness across multi-fabric networks, including branch locations, traditional WANs, SD-WANs and data centers, but also cloud and multi-cloud environments as well.
4. AI Begins to Create a Corporate Class Divide – AI and machine learning are beginning to show potential across robotics, security, networking, and much more. This excitement has the industry buzzing about the potential of these technologies to transform the world (for good and bad). But the reality is that humans are still a major requirement (human in the loop) for setting, managing and validating AI systems. Given the fact that smaller organizations often struggle with IT skills and resource shortages, we expect to see a corporate class divide as enterprises and governments benefit from the technology, while SMBs and mid-market companies fall behind.
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About the Author
John K. Smith is the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for LiveAction, where he is responsible for developing the technical vision, strategies, and relationships to drive product development to meet customer needs. He has been in the networking field for more than 15 years, holding two patents and four patent applications. Previously, Smith served as Vice President of engineering at Spirent Communications where his contributions led to more than $120 million in revenue per year, while overseeing the product line and leading more than 130 engineers. He has been in software development for more than 25 years. Smith holds a MS degree in Computer Science from the University of Hawaii and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, as well as a MBA from Chaminade University.
