Building a Bridge to the Future: Power Hybrid Environments with Network Resilience

The pandemic ushered in a new era, one where technology has created flexibility for organizations, employees, and customers. These technological advancements provide endless possibilities for all parties – increased productivity, improved customer experience, maximized service, and minimized costs.

Ensuring that these experiences exceed expectations, enterprises have become increasingly reliant on their network – a resilient network. Travel restrictions and lockdowns spurred by the pandemic were two of the main catalysts of this new, hybrid, digital age. One where products can be bought anywhere, solutions can be used anywhere and people can work from anywhere. These ever-increasingly complex environments require a solution that always provides presence and proximity to remote devices. It’s only a matter of time until a disruption occurs and when it does, depending on the solution an organization has in place, all operations may come to a standstill. By leveraging an always-on independent management plane, businesses can access their critical applications, even during an outage.

A resilient network is the foundation of hybrid, operational success. A connected ecosystem is integral to digital transformation initiatives being undertaken by most organizations, in every industry. In fact, the rapidly evolving customer expectations, growing market pressures, and overall organizational goals have fueled these continual efforts. It’s projected that by 2025, global spending for digital transformation is expected to reach $2.8 trillion.[1] One example of widespread digital transformation is that, according to Cisco, by 2025, leading-edge teams will have fully intent-based networks operating across domains. In data centers, campuses, remote sites, or even in the cloud, these networks will be able to comprehend business and application requirements and translate them to network and security policies. Improving agility through automation.

Hybrid Technologies

Consist of Implementing new technologies across all parts of an organization to optimize operations and drive growth by providing unique value to customers. Some types of hybrid technologies being deployed include:

Could Computing: Organizations are moving from legacy systems to cloud-based applications. Data is accessible from any device, providing flexibility and scalability to meet business demands.

Artificial Intelligence: AI can support many business needs including, automating processes, engaging with customers, and enabling intelligent decision-making based on the large amounts of data it continually collects.

Internet Of Things (IoT): Businesses can leverage IoT insights by collecting, exchanging, and analyzing data.

Any type of network disruption will render these applications useless. During network rollouts, it’s critical to have always-on network access. Potential disruptions have made it a necessity for organizations to analyze their current approach to IT infrastructure as they continually add new devices to the network. As consumers and employees continue to demand faster, more efficient services and more devices are added, a greater strain is put on the network increasing the likelihood of an outage. In the event of a disruption, organizations need an alternate path to the network.

The Vital Component to Hybrid Environments

Out-of-Band management is separate to the production network, so in the event of a disruption, engineers can monitor, access, monitor, and manage all devices. Edge locations typically lack experienced IT staff, so it gives the ability to remediate issues remotely, without sending a tech on-site.

Smart Out-of-Band provides an alternative path to devices located at remote sites when the primary network is down, providing access to edge infrastructure to ensure business continuity. The separate management plane solution allows organizations to securely monitor and access all devices without impacting normal operations. Proactive monitoring enables staff to preemptively recognize and remediate issues to reduce truck rolls.

Designed to provide the needed resilience at the edge, Smart Out-of-Band is scalable, enabling engineers to manage infrastructure at distributed sites. Troubleshooting and remediation at the network’s edge allows organizations to detect faults before they become failures which minimizes downtime and operating costs. Smart Out-of-Band enables organizations to:

  • Detect and remediate issues automatically
  • Operate independently from an in-band network
  • Send automated alerts via email or SMS to notify of network issues
  • Identify inconsistencies with temperature and network availability

This resilient backup connectivity allows enterprises to reduce the time-consuming nature of dispatching engineers to data center sites to make configuration changes and troubleshoot issues for business continuity.

Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform ensures that organizations have the connectivity needed throughout their digital transformation journey. Opengear is here to help you achieve your organizational goals on day one, every day, and when the network goes down.

Learn more, register for the webinar: Build Your Bridge to Network Resilience.

[1] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS48372321

Author's Bio

Analisa Dominic

Opengear

Opengear