Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) and AIOps are both red-hot technologies. SD-WANs increase application availability, reduce costs and in some cases improve performance. AIOps infuses machine learning into IT operations to increase the level of automation. This reduces errors and enables businesses to make changes at digital speeds. Most think of these as separate technologies, but the two are on a collision course and will give rise to what I'm calling the AI-driven WAN. 

SD-WAN not a panacea for all network woes

SD-WAN is the biggest leap forward in networking since… well, the actual WAN. But many solutions still rely on manual configurations. SD-WANs certainly increase application resiliency, lower telecommunications costs, and often increase application performance, but they are more complicated than traditional WANs. Initial setup can be a challenge, but the bigger issue is ongoing operations. Manually tweaking and tuning the network to adapt to business changes can be time consuming and error-prone. A solution is needed to bring better automation to SD-WANs.

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Digital innovation is disrupting businesses. Data and applications are at the hub of new business models, and data needs to travel across the extended network at increasingly high speeds without interruption. To make this possible, organizations are radically redesigning their networks by adopting multi-cloud environments, building hyperscale data centers, retooling their campuses, and designing new connectivity systems for their next-gen branch offices. Networks are faster than ever before, more agile and software-driven. They're also increasingly difficult to secure. To understand the challenges and how security needs to change, I recently talked with John Maddison, executive vice president of products for network security vendor Fortinet.

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By 2023, two-thirds of the world’s population will have Internet access—that’s 5.3 billion total Internet users, compared to 3.9 billion in 2018. The number of devices and connections will also skyrocket. There will be 3.6 networked devices per capita by 2023, whereas in 2018, there were 2.4 networked devices per capita.

These findings come from Cisco’s Annual Internet Report (2018 – 2023) (AIR) - previously known as Visual Network Index (VNI), which assesses the digital transformation across different business segments and their adoption of networking technologies, including fixed broadband, Wi-Fi, and mobile (3G, 4G, 5G). 

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Everyone watching Super Bowl 2020 witnessed the excitement that filled Hard Rock Stadium, as the Kansas City Chiefs became this year’s champions. (I was cheering hard for the 49ers but want to offer hearty congratulations to the new champs.) What wasn’t visible to the public—yet was omnipresent throughout the venue—was Wi-Fi connectivity that gave fans an enhanced experience during the game.

Whether it’s in a hospital, an office building, a university auditorium or a stadium, Wi-Fi scale matters. In hospitals, gameday is every day, and healthcare wireless networks play a vital role. Stadiums don’t always have gameday, but when they do, the WiFi has to work without a glitch.

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The concept of using passive optical LANs in enterprise campuses has been around for years, but hasn’t taken off because most businesses consider all-fiber networks to be overkill for their needs. I’ve followed this market for the better part of two decades, and now I believe we’re on the cusp of seeing POL go mainstream, starting in certain verticals.

The primary driver of change from copper to optical is that the demands on the network have evolved. Every company now considers its network to be business critical where just a few years ago, it was considered best effort in nature.  Downtime or a congested network meant inconvenienced users, but today they mean the business is likely losing big money.

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The network and security industries both continue to evolve at a rate never seen before.  Historically, security and network operation teams have worked in parallel with one another, sometimes being at odds with each other's goals.

However, that is changing as businesses rely on their networks to operate. It’s fair to say that today, for many companies, the network is the business. As this happens, network and security technologies need to be more closely aligned giving rise to the concept of security-driven networking.

In this post, ZK Research had a chance to sit down with the co-founder and CEO of Fortinet Ken Xie to discuss the future of networking and security. 

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SASE, pronounced "sassy," stands for secure access service edge, and it's being positioned by Gartner as the next big thing in enterprise networking. The technology category, which Gartner and other network experts first introduced earlier this year, converges the WAN edge and network security into a cloud-based, as-a-service delivery model. According to Gartner, the convergence is driven by customer demands for simplicity, scalability, flexibility, low latency, and pervasive security.

SASE brings together security and networking

A SASE implementation requires a comprehensive technology portfolio that only a few vendors can currently deliver. The technology is still in its infancy, with less than 1% adoption. There are a handful of existing SD-WAN providers, including Cato Networks, Juniper, Fortinet and Versa, that are expected to compete in the emerging SASE market. There will be other SD-WAN vendors jumping on this wagon, and the industry is likely to see another wave of startups. 

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Success in business and education today starts with infrastructure modernization. In fact, my research has found that digitally-forward organizations spend more than twice what their non-digital counterparts spend on evolving their IT infrastructure. However, most of the focus from IT has been on upgrading the application and compute infrastructure with little thought given to a critical ingredient – the network. Organizations can only be as agile as the least agile component of their infrastructure, and for most companies, that’s the network.

Manual processes plague network reliability

Legacy networks have outlived their useful life. The existing three+ tier architecture was designed for an era when network traffic was considered “best-effort,” where there was no way to guarantee performance or reserve bandwidth, and delivered non-mission-critical applications. Employees and educators ran applications locally, and the majority of critical data resided on workstations.

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As the cloud era meets the demands of digital transformation, networks must change. That means for enterprises, they must become simpler, said Juniper CEO Rami Rahim, speaking at the company's annual industry analyst conference last week.

The past five years has seen more innovation in networking than in the previous 30. Things such as SD-WAN, multi-cloud, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, 400 Gig, and edge computing are on the near-term horizon for almost every company. While all of those technologies have enabled the network to do so much more than ever before, their complexity has also risen.

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Secure software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has become one of the hottest new technologies, with some reports claiming that 85% of companies are actively considering SD-WAN to improve cloud-based application performance, replace expensive and inflexible fixed WAN connections, and increase security.

But now the industry is shifting to software-defined branch (SD-Branch), which is broader than SD-WAN but introduced several new things for organizations to consider, including better security for new digital technologies. To understand what's required in this new solution set, I recently sat down with John Maddison, Fortinet’s executive vice president of products and solutions.

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The use of digital or virtual assistants and chatbots has picked up momentum with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). These automated assistants have been around for years, but they haven't been all that useful, as they required a significant amount of programming to look for certain keywords and then the responses were based on logical guesses. 

The infusion of AI, however, has made these systems much smarter and now natural language queries can be made and responses are in plain English (or other languages).

Many businesses have adopted digital assistants and chatbots to improve customer service. For example, Atom Tickets uses conversational AI to enable people to book movie tickets and even dinner with just a short sentence instead of having to go through the rigmarole of going back and forth with discrete commands.

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Migrating to a cloud computing model will obviously have an impact on the infrastructure that’s deployed. This shift has already been seen in the areas of servers, storage, and networking, as those technologies have evolved to a “software-defined” model. And it appears that application delivery controllers (ADCs) are on the precipice of a similar shift.

In fact, a new ZK Research study about cloud computing adoption and the impact on ADCs found that, when looking at the deployment model, hardware appliances are the most widely deployed — with 55% having fully deployed or are currently testing and only 15% currently researching hardware. (Note: I am an employee of ZK Research.)

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I’ve worked with a number of companies that have implemented digital projects only to see them fail. The ideation was correct, the implementation was sound, and the market opportunity was there. The weak link? The Wi-Fi network.

For example, a large hospital wanted to improve clinician response times to patient alarms by having telemetry information sent to mobile devices. Without the system, the only way a nurse would know about a patient alarm is from an audible alert. And with all the background noise, it’s often tough to discern where noises are coming from. The problem was the Wi-Fi network in the hospital had not been upgraded in years and caused messages to be significantly delayed in their delivery, often taking four to five minutes to deliver. The long delivery times caused a lack of confidence in the system, so many clinicians stopped using it and went back to manual alerting. As a result, the project was considered a failure.

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There's a lot of hype around the next Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ax, more commonly known as Wi-Fi 6. Often new technologies are built up by vendors as the "next big thing" and then flop because they don’t live up to expectations. In the case of Wi-Fi 6, however, the fervor is warranted because it's the first Wi-Fi standard designed with the premise that Wi-Fi is the primary connection for devices rather than a network of convenience.

Wi-Fi 6 is a different kind of Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi 6 is loaded with features, such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), 1024-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) encoding, and target wake time (TWT), that make Wi-Fi faster and less congested. Many of these enhancements came from the world of LTE and 4G, which addressed these challenges long ago. These new features will lead to a better mobile experience and longer client battery life, and they will open the door to a wide range of applications that could not have been done on Wi-Fi in the past. For example, an architect could now use virtual reality (VR) over Wi-Fi to showcase a house.

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