11/7/2023: VMware Edge Network Intelligence is now VMware Edge Intelligence! Announced at VMware Explore Barcelona, Intelligent Assist for VMware Software-Defined Edge will bring VMware Edge Intelligence together with generative AI to provide intelligent remediation and security for both OT and IT environments. Read our blog post to learn more.
Updated 10/19/2022
Part 4: A Workplace-Agnostic Solution for a More Helpful Network
Note: This is the fourth in a four-part series about how VMware Edge Network Intelligence™ enables better insights for IT into client device experience and client behavior.
The enterprise edge is expanding along with the distributed workforce
The ability, and the need, to work from anywhere has become accepted reality for many enterprises. Enterprise IT, however, has had a hard time supporting work-from-anywhere (WFA) employees. They are using whatever device they have, not necessarily a standard device with a standard configuration provided by their enterprise. They are using whatever cellular network or local ISP they have, not a network designed for business-grade access to enterprise applications.
It’s more difficult to support a user on a home or mobile network, because the infrastructure components are not completely within the enterprises’ control. IT teams are still figuring out how to extend their operational models to provide a secure environment without compromising employees’ user experiences.
As the edge of the network becomes more complex, IT departments are struggling to provide a consistent and high quality user experience. Their issues involve how to:
Understand the overall availability of users (e.g. uptime, response time, quality of experience)
Proactively identify and isolate issues that are affecting users, and do it at scale
Guide employees to resolve issues when they occur
Calculate the value that different technologies are providing for WFH/WFA users
Isolate faults and figure out if an issue is with an application, with an employee’s LAN, with the WAN, or someplace else. Even when IT believes they have isolated the fault, they can’t give any guidance. “We think it’s your home network” is not a satisfying response to hear from the help desk.
Enter VMware Edge Network Intelligence
SD-WAN is evolving. It began as an edge-to-edge technology, but now it is expanding to serve individual clients that access the network anywhere, from home networks to mobile devices to large campuses, and through to the cloud. With this evolution, it’s becoming more difficult to secure the edge and make sure that user experience doesn’t degrade as the edge multiplies into millions of homes and devices.
VMware Edge Network Intelligence is a vendor-agnostic artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) solution focused on the enterprise edge. The solution uses machine learning-based predictive analysis, actionable intelligence, and proactive remediation to assure performance, security, and visibility of end-user and IoT devices at the distributed enterprise edge—branch, campus or home.
VMware Edge Network Intelligence provides visibility not just into the SD-WAN network, but all the way to the LAN. Network administrators gain a complete view of the client experience, whether or not that client is using SD-WAN to access the network.
Work use casesfor AIOpsat the edge
To understand the business cases for VMware Edge Network Intelligence, it’s helpful to look at three types of employees—power users, standard users and light users—who could be working at home, working in the office, or working from anywhere.
An example of a power user is a radiologist who needs fast, reliable bandwidth to view scans, or a call center worker who can’t afford dropped VoIP calls. These workers are more likely to have an SD-WAN device in their home office, such as a VMware SD-WAN Edge. With VMware Edge Network Intelligence integrated into VMware SD-WAN Edges, the Edges themselves will be able to provide the information that helps IT isolate faults and proactively address problems. AIOPs helps justify the investment that companies have made in SD-WAN by showing improvement in user experience. Moreover, AIOPs enables self-healing networks where the system can get ahead of application performance issues and simply inform IT of the remediation actions taken.
Standard users and light users, who use typical business apps such as Microsoft 365 and Zoom, are less likely to have SD-WAN in their home offices. For these users, VMware Edge Network Intelligence can get user experience data from the clients themselves using a client app, and from application integrations with apps such as Zoom. This gives IT uniform insight into employee user experience, no matter where the user is working.
Into the future
VMware SD-WAN is also expanding to the secure access service edge (SASE) as cloud networking and cloud security converge. By offering AIOPs at the edge with a cloud-first approach, reliable application delivery and intrinsic security, VMware SASE™ enables flexibility, agility, and scale for enterprises of all sizes. VMware Edge Network Intelligence is integrated into VMware SASE, providing actionable insights for performance assurance and a self-healing network through AI/ML-enabled visibility from the WAN to branch and Wi-Fi/LAN.
