We’ve all heard about the new challenges that today’s connected, data-rich environments bring. But modern infrastructures also set the stage for great opportunities for organizations that can gain and apply the right insights.
One of the most powerful capabilities of SD-WAN is its ability to create and collect massive volumes of data about your network and applications. When you tap into this valuable information with the right tools, you can gain insights to offer a better client experience—and achieve better business outcomes by improving the availability of your infrastructure.
Up-leveling the client experience
VMware SD-WAN generates a vast amount of records about the flow and performance of distributed applications. Although it’s possible to explore and visualize the data, its sheer volume is too big for manual analysis. However, by applying an automated AIOps process, enabled by machine learning, you can gain a deeper understanding into big data, and apply it to enable a richer client experience.
VMware Edge Network Intelligence™ is a vendor-agnostic AIOps that leverages data to automatically determine baselines that enable you to evaluate your network activity and application performance. It gives you the context you need to understand how well your applications are running, considering metrics like the normal percentage of devices that connect, and the typical number of users. VMware Edge Network Intelligence can also consider network activity at different times and locations, along with details about each entity’s WAN link, as well as use case requirements for specific industries.
Developing these baselines is just the first step toward building insights. After establishing normal baselines with machine learning, it’s easier to spot deviations, and track or even predict whether any changes to the network have an impact on performance. VMware Edge Network Intelligence helps you be more proactive about your network environment, fix problems before they happen, and predict where issues might occur, to help maximize performance and uptime, and deliver a superior client experience on any device.
Toward a more secure environment
Security remains top of mind for most organizations in a fast-changing threat landscape. AIOps lets you apply SD-WAN data to help strengthen network security—while maximizing performance. VMware Edge Network Intelligence follows VMware’s best practice of establishing a baseline of “known good” parameters, then detecting deviations from that baseline. You can utilize a variety of secure access service edge (SASE) data sources to apply this security principle. For example, a unified access gateway can provide considerable information about the security posture of a particular client device. Next-generation secure web gateways and firewalls can also provide important insights into both security and performance.
To maintain maximum performance, access control lists (ACLs) or deny lists configured on these devices can dramatically impact the user experience. Perhaps certain end points can’t be accessed, due to ACLs configured on these devices. From a security standpoint, being able to baseline the normal things accessed by a device and automatically determine when it accesses something outside of that baseline is critical.
Innovative, self-healing support
Ultimately, VMware Edge Network Intelligence data analytics can enable you to acquire and analyze the data you need to build a more robust, self-healing environment. The VMware SD-WAN™ platform already enables self-healing by reacting to changes in the network based on local information, and guided by business policy and intent. AIOps can enhance these capabilities by incorporating global information acquired over much longer periods of time. This additional information helps the SD-WAN platform detect patterns to actually locate the source of any network problem, and address them faster and more effectively.
