It’s Time to Embrace Network Automation and Orchestration

We are all indebted to the many network engineers who have performed their tasks faithfully through the years. They laid the foundation for the vast internet ecosystem that we enjoy today. And while we do not wish to replace them, it’s time to let the machines take over work that has become routine and repetitive – while the engineers move on to new challenges. Cisco’s automation and orchestration solutions, working through CloudCenter, streamline the work of network engineering and leverage the power of computing in new ways.

Telemetry and Real-time Analytics

The traditional model for network management covers five keys areas: fault management, configuration management, accounting management, performance management and security management. The acronym FCAPS is the short form. However, network services automation from Cisco and offered by BayInfotech use telemetry and real-time analytics to deal with many of the same issues. While traditional network management systems depended on SNMP traps to create alerts for the network operator, Cisco automation depends on data modeling, providing intelligent insights to manage the network. The idea is to let the machines do the work.

Orchestrating Across Environments

Today’s multicloud, hybrid networks can be complicated. Cisco’s Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) helps simplify operations and deliver revenue-generating services faster. In addition, network orchestration offers the speed and efficiency of real-time automation for growing networks. With NSO you can add, change and delete services without disrupting overall service, and you can quickly deliver new services in real time. NSO can reduce manual configuration activities by up to 90%. Like an orchestra director coordinates many instrumentalists to make beautiful music, a network orchestrator makes tools and devices in different environments work together smoothly. In Cisco’s CloudCenter, you can manage workloads from many cloud providers as well as from public and private data centers. Cisco platforms like Arcus Server can help you define parameters for CloudCenter configuration.

An Array of Applications and Technologies

Some people confuse the terms automation and orchestration, as TechTarget points out. The site describes the difference this way: “Generally, automation is used to describe the automation of a low-level if-this- then-that (IFTTT) management task, while orchestration is used to describe the automation of management tasks that have lots of dependencies.” However, these technologies are not isolated in one or two products. Cisco and BayInfotech offer solutions such as Webex, AppDynamics, Cisco Container Platform and Hyperflex to help you easily control your infrastructure.

Conclusion

There are many ways to manage information technology. Some experienced engineers actually enjoy the manual work. They like to remind us of the old days when they did everything with the command line interface (CLI) and solved all the problems in their heads. But times change, and so does network engineering. While living in the past can be nostalgic, it will be those who take full advantage of the best technology who will succeed in the 21st century. Automated and orchestrated cloud solutions provided by BayInfotech offer the leverage needed to manage today’s network and applications environments.