The recent pandemic forced companies to accelerate the pace of their digital transformation and adapt to the new way of doing business. We saw companies of all sizes, across all industries, compelled to invest in advanced, collaborative technologies. But perhaps most notably, there also has been a significant increase in investment with respect to network automation, for both enterprises and telcos.
As we look ahead to 2023, there are a few trends we believe will come to the forefront and dominate for both enterprises and telcos.
Enterprise Trends
#1: Programmability is Here
First, looking back to just a few years ago, most business networks were not programmable. When automating networks, you had to automate them on the CLI from devices. As we move into the new year, programmable networks are more commonplace. And while we have seen more vendors move towards a controller-centric environment, enterprises are beginning to adopt controllers at scale.
The vendor community has caught up and is now providing equipment with programmable interfaces, an API to their network equipment. We think 2023 will be the year this becomes the de facto way of managing networks. Additionally, automation will be centered on APIs. Rather than automate box-by-box or device-by-device, you will now talk to the API, and that API will talk to 10s, 100s or 1000s of network elements.
We are continuing to see the thinking shift from automating box-by-box to “How do I automate through these APIs?”
#2: The rise of NetDevOps and CI/CD Pipeline Solutions
Second, enterprises evolving their networking strategies to treat their infrastructures as code will also gain prominence. The rise of solutions to help enterprise customers adopt a modern network operating model that delivers an agile, data-driven change management process for the network will continue. To further accelerate network automation and orchestration, network operators are changing the way they think about network changes and configuration management and looking more to DevOps practices of building and updating software with traditional CI/CD pipelines.
So what does this mean? It means, CICD in network automation – the ability to blend high code with pipelines and low code drag and drop for NetOps – will enable a faster, more reliable deployment with reduced operational time and expense. And we believe NetDevOps will help enterprises answer a critical question: “How do you build an organization that can function across different skill sets with different processes?”
Recently, Cisco published Cisco’s Hybrid Cloud Trends report where 55% of those surveyed said they have created a cross-functional team with technical and business representation and 50% of respondents have a centralized CloudOps and NetOps function to help ensure their organization’s hybrid cloud strategy meets business objectives. We expect to see this increase even further in 2023.
#3: Multi-cloud/hybrid cloud networking will take off in 2023
It’s no secret, enterprises need to deploy orchestration solutions that enable them to tie together multiple networks and multiple domains, all while empowering multiple teams to work together to ensure network operation reliability.
According to Cisco’s Hybrid Cloud Trends report, “The transition to cloud-native application architectures is accelerating as organizations look to these technologies to support better performance and security of their applications.”
- 91% of those surveyed are moving or planning to move or refactor production workloads and applications using cloud-native technologies.
- 82% of survey respondents have adopted hybrid cloud.
- 92% of organizations said they use more than two public cloud providers
- 79% say more than half of their workloads will run on different hardware across all environments, reinforcing the need for a comprehensive toolset for managing workloads.
With Futuriom’s The Future of Hybrid Cloud Automation report noting that data can reside anywhere, this is fueling many of the drivers behind the move to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, including digital transformation projects, hybrid work arrangements, automation, and data analytics efforts enabled by cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
All of this is leading some organizations to rethink their network strategy.
Telco Trends
#1: The Economic Slowdown Will Continue to Impact Service Provider Network Projects
Due to the ongoing economic slowdown, businesses are cutting capital expenses across the board, resulting in increased project scrutiny. So what can SPs – and their vendors – do to stay agile and weather the uncertainty? For new projects, automation can streamline processes, improve repeatability, and reduce manual effort to reduce the effort and cost to deploy new capital. For operations, automation enables teams to gain efficiencies for manually intensive activities, enabling the SP to become more lean.
As we know, automation enables businesses to shift employee focus from mundane tasks to more crucial functions such as strategy planning, ideation, streamlining process workflows, and risk analysis, etc. The good news is that the current technology is at a different point than in previous years. The degree of automation in the networks and systems we’re working with today is much higher than what could have been achieved in the past, which makes service providers and other businesses better equipped to ride out the current economic environment.
#2: Infrastructure as Code Will Solidify Its Hold on Telco Networks
We continue to see Infrastructure as Code (IaC) gaining ground and becoming a more prevalent trend in the telco industry, evolving from a very cloud-centric activity and starting to expand into other domains within the network. This momentum around IaC will continue through 2023 and beyond.
Programmable interfaces are being deployed at a much larger scale within the industry. And as networks continue to become more programmable, we’re continuing to see more growth around using software development principles for managing the networks.
For example, in the past, companies like Cisco would develop a router that was relatively complicated to work with – you had to learn a whole new language to operate it. Today, operators are demanding more flexibility and openness with the devices they deploy which is forcing hardware vendors to “expose” and provide a level of functionality and access to their devices that wasn’t previously required.
#3: Service Providers Mixing it Up: Pivoting Toward Third Party Solutions vs. Internal Product Development
Additionally, service providers have historically resisted putting products and services on their networks that they didn’t develop and/or don’t actively manage. But that’s changing too, with examples ranging from AT&T moving revenue generating network functions to Azure and with the growing use of off-the-shelf SD-WAN platforms by managed service providers.
As service providers look to differentiate their residential businesses from their enterprise and wireless businesses, we’re seeing a shift in the ways they structure their models by onboarding more third party products and moving more functions to the cloud.
This increased willingness to offer new products and services that the service providers themselves didn't create and don't manage is a major change (maybe even a concession) in the way they run their businesses. Third party products make differentiating service offerings more complicated and also add another layer of complexity to managing networks when service providers are forced to manage across pipelines. Because the overall environment is becoming more complex, the ability to manage and define the customer becomes more complex, as well.
Without proper care, all this operational complexity can drive costs up. Automation can simplify all of the necessary integrations and even use pre-built modules versus having to start from scratch.
