Network governance changes to keep pace with ever-evolving and expanding networks
By Francesco Guzzo, DevOps & Automation Manager at Kirey Group
The network infrastructure is one of the cornerstones of the IT world: it supports the storage and exchange of all the data necessary for business, both internally and externally. This makes it a sensitive and continuously evolving area that requires stability, scalability, and a documented process for governance.
However, compared to a few years ago, the scenario of network governance is becoming increasingly complex. The coexistence of varied infrastructures, such as public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises systems, is driving an evolution in the management challenge.
Today, in particular, the cloud makes network governance more difficult, increasing complexity and reducing visibility. This phenomenon is strengthening the need to find new ways to gather information, keep it updated over time, and share it with other business tools/processes to enable more accurate predictive analyses.
For all these reasons, NetOps, an approach to dthat promoteseveloping and managing corporate networks aimed at promoting the typical benefits of GitOps (automation, collaboration, programmability), is gaining traction in managing flexible and scalable infrastructures that can adapt to changing business needs.
From individual expertise to the power of automation
Where the traditional concept of network operations has focused on manual tasks and specific tools for monitoring and troubleshooting network issues, the NetOps approach, following the GitOps model, aims to foster automation in network operations, offering significant benefits, especially for businesses relying on highly complex infrastructures.
More specifically, NetOps aims to create greater network awareness by providing a complete view of the network and its configuration, implementing automation in controls and processes—from alarms to network status reports to security checks—and supporting integrations. By sharing the collected data, it is possible to feed the many corporate tools and products that rely on network information.
The benefits are numerous. Automation eliminates or significantly reduces manual interventions in network management, which are often a source of errors, maximizing efficiency and enabling quick reactions to necessary changes, such as scaling resources or deploying new applications.
In other words, without automation, it would be impossible to manually manage the configuration, security, and monitoring of an expanding network. Thanks to integration with advanced monitoring tools that provide real-time visibility into the entire infrastructure, automation can also help quickly identify bottlenecks, failures, or security threats and proactively address them.
It's no surprise that one of the ultimate goals of integrating automation with NetOps is to get as close as possible to a "self-healing network", where human intervention in daily operations is minimized, standardizing and strengthening networks that today still sometimes rely on the historical knowledge of network engineers or "homegrown" tools.
The future of NetOps
However, NetOps is not the end goal; rather, it is a necessary step in the digitalization process, while network automation itself is already evolving.
Automation will continue to evolve, enabling the management of increasingly complex networks. In the future, we can expect automation tools capable of integrating network and security operations into a single platform, as well as automation processes that learn from data and adapt to new situations.
By exploring the trends shaping AI and NetOps, it becomes clear that the next phase will bring even more advances in AI for networking and cybersecurity, with measures including predictive threat modeling, intelligent response, and improvements in user authentication protocols. With technologies such as 5G, IoT (Internet of Things), and the continually expanding digital ecosystem, collaboration between AI, NetOps, and cybersecurity is set to lead us toward a future where networks seamlessly adapt and evolve.
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