Due to the pandemic, we’ve spent the past two years ushering in new ways of doing things. Sales teams have learned how to connect with business partners and customers online, project managers virtually oversee execution from remote sites, and engineers can determine the right system architecture via video calls.
One thing these modifications all have in common is that they all rely on telecommunication and IT infrastructures to function. Digitization, cloudification, and new technologies, which were already underway before the pandemic, have intensified greatly.
As a result, enterprises and telecom operators will need to change how they plan their future network and IT infrastructures. In 2022 and beyond, network and IT infrastructure planning and by extension, inventory management, will be dramatically transformed. Even when the pandemic is behind us, the changes we’ve made because of it will have altered network and IT infrastructures and their resource documentation and planning permanently. Let’s take a look at how:
#1: Digitalization, Cloudification and New Technologies
Remote work and education are forcing both enterprises and governments to invest massively in digitalization to keep employees and students connected at all times.
Digitalization accelerates cloudification, and both go hand in hand with a modernization of the network and IT infrastructure. With cloudification, applications moving into the cloud and legacy IT infrastructures vanish from the campus. Connectivity must be adapted to the new environment, and new technologies must be introduced faster in the networks. Depending on the use cases, technologies like SD-WAN or optical connectivity can be used and are replacing traditional, copper based, leased lines.
As enterprises are typically geographically distributed with offices in different cities or countries, we will see single office-centric campus networks vanishing and being replaced with “One-Enterprise-Network”, spanning all campuses of an enterprise.
IoT technologies will enable new security, monitoring and tracking use cases and will add a high number of new devices, functions and applications to the traditional IT and network infrastructure. This will result in many addition requirements for resource management.
Also, in telecommunications, the trend towards network virtualization will be enforced. Network functions, formerly installed on physical devices, becoming virtualized into software and moving into the cloud or onto servers will become a requirement. Reconfigurations will become more dynamic and create new challenges for resource management. For example, there will be a move from manual configuration management approaches to pre-planned, automated, and SDN-based management structures.
Automation is only possible when resource data is universally available across the organization and not confined to traditional network, IT, and data center silos. Administrators will need access to data that lives outside their sphere of responsibility. They will need to trust this critical data is up to date and accurate, as they rely on it for planning network changes and making critical capacity decisions. Therefore, there will be a rise in unified resource management inventory solutions, which will provide a single source of truth to all users in an organization, across all organizational domains, to meet this requirement.
#2: Reliance on Digital Twins
The single source of truth, also known as a digital twin of the infrastructure, allows the management and rollouts of new technologies to be faster and less disruptive when it is used for planning and documentation. One of the biggest benefits of a digital twin is that it makes it possible to plan complex infrastructure changes and simulate the effects on the overall infrastructure resources. As the infrastructure becomes more complicated due to the cloudification and number of technologies involved, the utility of a digital twin becomes clear.
The ability to run simulations and see the impact of changes before they take effect and play with various scenarios before selecting the best one for any given situation are both game changers made possible by a digital twin. In the context of the changes businesses are making to adapt to the post-pandemic world, the ability to properly pre-plan becomes crucial.
#3: Necessity of Integration
A prerequisite for sound planning is systems that align between each other horizontally and reconcile data from the network, data centers, and applications. A digital twin based on a unified resource inventory management is how this will be achieved going forward.
New complex solutions are designed end-to-end, using resources and functions from the network, IT, and data center domains, across cloud and non-cloud platforms, and whether they are physical, logical, or virtual. With that, we see an increased pressure to integrate resource management solutions with application and cloud as well as network management systems. This is important to keep the data aligned with the physical reality and corresponding configurations, as well as integration into ERP, OSS and BSS systems to provide data for any higher layer processes.
A precondition for these integrations is reliable and easy-to-use interfaces, which are already a must-have for today’s management solutions. The difference between the interfaces needed and those of the past is that, going forward, they will shift to requiring event-driven designs. Users want to know their data is aligned in near real-time behind the scenes, so they don’t need to rely on daily updates. This enables faster processes and removes system and team boundaries.
#4: Intensifying FTTx and 5G Technology Rollouts
Governments around the world are prioritizing broadband expansion to bring high-speed internet to all areas and are funding FTTx and 5G rollout programs to make this vision a reality. This is critically important in the pandemic era, as remote work and virtual education are driving an increased need for bandwidth and these new technologies are needed to deliver it.
Massive video streaming and video conferences create a new level of demands on networks and IT infrastructures. Enormous amounts of data must be transported from the home office/classroom to the campus network, and connections need to be reliable. Fiber optics address these needs, with its high bandwidth and the distance that data can travel without attenuation. 5G addresses these needs as well, as it can handle rising bandwidth requirements due to more connected devices caused by remote work and school. Also, with the increasing bandwidth in 5G networks, the move from microwave to optical mobile backhaul connectivity accelerates, as does the introduction of optical fronthaul solutions. The result is heavily changing mobile networks.
The rollout of public 5G networks has reached its zenith, at least for “Non-Standalone”, LTE coupled 5G networks. But standalone 5G networks and the management of their cloud-based functions is still ongoing and challenging as new types of virtual functions must be managed in the data centers. Additionally, Private 5G Campus networks are showing up, driven by IoT use cases.
Planning FTTx and 5G rollouts will be done differently going forward, especially considering that planners are working remotely. There is a notable shift to automated, georeferenced planning and documentation software, as these tools marry asset information with location details, and allow a smooth workflow in a distributed and home office-based team.
#5: The X Factor: Visualization
Having all information in one database and keeping it up to date automatically is one thing, but how to visualize and present the data to users is another matter entirely.
The topic of visualization has two facets: a statistical (BI) view of the content, which is needed to track progress and understand utilization and cost, and a technical service-focused view that hinges on understanding the end -to-end routing and dependencies between physical, logical, and virtual resources.
The technical service view is required for complex networks and IT infrastructures. They need to be visualized to properly manage and plan changes. This capability has been lacking but great strides will be made in making it available to network and IT operators, and it will be a welcome addition to their network management toolset.
Network topologies have always been complex but are dramatically more so in the digital age. Multiple technologies and the hybrid nature of today’s infrastructures make analyzing and using this data extremely challenging. Their complex structures and mission-critical data relationships make their interrelationships hard to identify and even harder to control. The ability to view infrastructure and service dataand relationships through graphs and diagrams is valuable because such a representation of networks, infrastructures, and services and IT assets, resources, and their interrelationships make it possible to identify patterns, analyze data faster, and better understand relationships within infrastructures and networks. This insight enables network operators to make better, faster, knowledge-based decisions despite increasing network complexity.
For these reasons, we expect the use of software-assisted depictions of complex network topologies from various network technologies and layers to pick up steam.
The takeaway
Digitalization is our new reality and makes reliable network and IT infrastructure more important than ever. Consequently, resource management across cloud, on-premises platforms, and the network will be required.
Inventory and resource management solutions will be a pivotal enabler going forward. A highly sophisticated solution has capabilities to manage resources from different domains and regardless of whether it is a physical, logical, or virtual resource.
As new applications and technologies appear, the resource management solution in use is affected. It must provide end-to-end views to the operators and the planners. A trustworthy resource documentation and planning database is a requirement to efficiently roll out the new technologies and use cases, and it is also the basis for any kind of automated and workflow driven processes.
While a challenge for all, the pandemic has also been a stimulus to speed up the adoption of new ways of doing things and to rethink how we work, live and go about our daily lives.
