Reimagining Networking: My Vision for a Secure Data Exchange with an Agentic AI Overlay
A New Era for Networking Last week at the AI Networking Summit in Dallas, I shared a vision for the future of networking that challenges us to rethink what our industry is fundamentally about. We’re no longer just moving packets between devices; we’re orchestrating a secure data exchange that powers the AI era. Our current enterprise compute infrastructure—rigid, siloed, and reliant on outdated protocols like BGP—is buckling under the weight of petabyte-scale networks, exponential AI growth, and unpredictable traffic patterns. To meet these demands, we…
ONUG Promotes IT Design Pattern Innovations
IT Design Patterns Needed – Now More Than Ever Over the past decade, successive waves of technology innovation have resulted in complex IT infrastructure that is problematic to manage and secure. Given the myriad of challenges and the extraordinary level of complexity that IT networking, cloud and security operations professionals are grappling with today, the need for new design patterns has never been more acute. Cutting through all this complexity and converging on innovative, trusted design patterns is no mean feat, but ONUG is uniquely…
The Evolution of AI in Network Operations: From AIOps to GenAI
Generative AI is Accelerating AI Adoption Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving and beginning to transform IT operations with expanding use cases that offer efficiency to labor-intensive network operations, particularly in Network Operations Centers (NOC) and Security Operations Centers (SOC). The recently formed ONUG Collaborative AI-Driven NOC/SOC Automation Project is exploring this evolution and its implications in this first of a series of blog posts on the topic. Over the past several years AIOps has become a buzzword that vendors use to offer the promise…
Winning Private 5G Use Cases
The ONUG Community is obsessed with use cases. Critical use cases for multi-cloud adoption determine the direction and outcomes of the ONUG Collaborative Working Groups. ONUG conference sessions feature enterprise IT professionals discussing and debating the merits of solutions for critical networking and security use cases critical to success in complex multi-cloud operations. In 2023, ONUG launched a new private 5G (P5G) networks initiative that has culminated in the creation of the new Private 5G Event at ONUG Fall and the recent launch of the…
ONUG Launches Private 5G Working Group
Working groups serve as ONUG’s vehicle for generating industry change, with members of the ONUG Community – IT professionals, vendors, service providers and solutions integrators – joining together to address the business and technical challenges that enterprises must overcome on their digital transformation journey. Working groups engage in a collaborative process to develop recommended solutions for the top-priority use cases for typical deployment scenarios in complex enterprise networking environments. Based on the strong interest in private 5G networks at the recent ONUG Spring 2023 event…
The Complexities of Policy as Code
We say these things quite often, “tip of the iceberg” or “on the surface…”. I love a good metaphor. And while I’m not prone to hyperbole, metaphors are the greatest linguistic invention in the history of everything ever created in the universe. Ignoring that important reality, and with all due respect to similes and analogies, my brain landed on the previously mentioned metaphors whilst recently pondering Policy as Code. On the surface, it feels that Policy-as-code solutions should be very straight forward. There are clear…
Livin’ on the Edge
My musical interests are diverse. Classic rock, alternative rock, rap, folk, classical –heck, throw me a show tune every now and then; no one needs to know. I like what I like, and I don’t care if you do. But enough about me being a Nickelback defender. What I DO know is if I make a musical reference to a 1993 song, like Aerosmith’s Livin’ on the Edge, some of you won’t get it…and that’s ok. Nonetheless, that’s where we’re gonna hang out in this…
ONUG O&A Working Group Expands Charter and Renames to Hyperautomation Working Group
Since the O&A working group was started in the fall of 2019 a lot has changed. Digital transformation initiatives have been accelerated, largely due to the pandemic. The adoption of cloud computing and all things SaaS has dramatically increased within Enterprise IT. With the rise of Hybrid infrastructure and edge compute new holistic security challenges, and availability have become major pain points, especially when networks scale and IT talent is scarce. Therefore the importance of automation has moved up into the top five most important…
Don’t Go Alone on Your Enterprise Cloud Journey; Be Safe…Go with Friends
ONUG is a community-driven organization. When ONUG was established back in 2012, its charter was to provide a forum for IT business leaders to exchange ideas, best practices and deployment challenges associated with skills/culture, process and solutions. Its early members realized that collectively as a community, they are stronger. No one company can change an industry. The largest of corporations or consumers of IT can get the best pricing, but they can’t change architecture and overall vendor approaches to deliver solutions. Only a community that…
