Rest Assured IT Pros, More Help is on the Way for Your Intent-based Networks

There is no question that it’s a hard-knock life to be an IT professional in the age of Digital Transformation, which promises to upend just about every aspect of what it means to be an IT expert. The result of this is that IT pros can expect to deal with more and more complexities in their jobs while having fewer and fewer resources at their disposal as “shadow IT” siphons more budget from IT and into the hands of lines of business, software developers, and other non-IT users of technologies.

Even the key performance indicators that IT pros and their departments are judged by are changing fundamentally. In the “good old days” these KPIs might have been technology-centric measures such as system uptime, network capacity, or hardware performance. Today, it’s likely to be something far more ethereal, namely in the form of delivering optimal “customer experience”. It is no wonder why IT experts seem genuinely confused by what that actually means or whether they’re doing a good job or not, according to this IT trends report:

The report also uncovered a reality-perception gap among IT professionals: While nearly 84% of IT personnel said they are confident that their organization is well-prepared to support digital services, more than half said they experienced incidents that affect customers, such as slowness or downtime, at least once a week.

One piece of good news in all this gloom-and-doom is the fact that IT pros, by-and-large, are a happy lot who are mostly satisfied with their careers. In fact, according to CompTIA, IT jobs occupy four of the top five jobs in the US across all fields. Even with a huge grain of salt (considering CompTIA is the trade association for IT pros), this is a positive sign for the future of the IT profession.

The good news is Cisco is delivering new innovation and services that will likely make tech experts even happier in the coming years.

Services: The Path to Intent-based Networking Success

In 2017, Cisco reset the very definition of networking with Intent-based Networking, which leverages high levels of network intelligence and automation to make networks responsive to business needs and not vice-versa. Already, the expectations for Intent-based Networking’s impact is sky high. Late in 2017, Gartner published a report predicting that “more than 1,000 large enterprises will use intent-based networking systems in production, up from less than 50 today.”

The reasons for the enthusiastic responses for Networking Initiative from enterprises is because of the compelling benefits it delivers, including:

Speed and agility. The network is able to rapidly respond to an organization’s needs with little manual intervention.

Business value. The reduced time and effort required to maintain the network translates into more time for network innovations that provide real value to the business.

Risk reduction. This is achieved through faster threat detection and containment, continuous compliance, and reduced downtime caused by human error.

The path from promise to fulfillment is a relatively straight line with the goal being a successful implementation. This is where Cisco Services plays a crucial role by helping companies accelerate their intent-based networking journeys through unmatched expertise, tailored customer engagement, and operational excellence.

Recently, Cisco demonstrated its commitment toward this goal with the introduction of Cisco Services for Enterprise Networking DNA Assurance and the Network Assurance Engine. Cisco designed these new services to empower IT pros with the knowledge, tools, and insights required to make the transition to an Intent-based Network model, which begins with operating proactively when it comes to managing networks and their underlying applications and workloads.

We help customers every step of the way by accelerating deployments and by helping them better understand the network data and insights their Intent-based Networks are generating. Specifically, Cisco Services arms IT pros with necessary knowledge and training, and best-in-class solution support, which will all be critical in ensuring that companies maximize the value of their Intent-based Networks.

This is a must-have step for IT pros to deliver optimal “customer experience” that today’s businesses have identified as a key to their success and viability. It also reinforces how the network is at the heart of any organization’s infrastructure and operations paradigm, even those making the exciting and sometimes perilous digital transformation journey.

For more information, please visit Cisco Services.