Maintaining robust network security in today’s threat climate is a challenge. Adhering to best practices is just as difficult. However, both are necessary to ensure that organizations can continue running efficiently and securely with minimal interruption or downtime to the network.
This is easier said than done, but with the array of technologies available today, it is possible to achieve. AIOps is a valuable tool for monitoring an organization’s network, such as the Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), for potential issues and vulnerabilities, and enhancing the overall performance to deliver secure and reliable connectivity across various locations. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning AIOps uses telemetry analysis to monitor the network and correlate data to provide a holistic view of the network’s health, performance and security to help companies adhere to best practice standards.
Optimal networks provide optimal user experience
The network forms the backbone of most organizations today. The quality and reliability of the user experience are closely aligned with infrastructure performance. This is why companies must focus on securely and efficiently connecting users and devices to applications and data. If the network is not performing optimally, neither is the business.
With AIOps solutions, organizations can easily and effectively observe, predict and resolve issues before they impact the business. This process automatically ensures that the network is running efficiently with no anomalies, as it cuts through the noise of alerts and log entries by correlating and generating deduplication, and actionable insights for security teams to respond to.
Through this observation, AIOps learns what usual behavior looks like, and can spot anomalies, in real-time, across the network. Network teams can take a more proactive approach, combining the data with the additional context from each component, and resolving issues faster with the use of automated playbooks.
This all happens in the background to identify and diagnose issues and potential threats, often before customers or employees even notice that anything has happened.
More efficient use of IT teams
While AIOps solutions are set up to find and defend against potential network issues, there are times when human intervention is required. To maintain a high-quality experience for employees and even customers on the network, administrators can use the visual reports produced by the AIOps solution to analyze the overall user experience across various devices and locations and gain granular insight into utilization, latency, packet loss and jitter, providing a comprehensive overview of the user experience. This enables administrators to identify and intervene to address potential issues hampering the end-user experience.
In addition, AIOps uses predictive insights gathered through machine-learning algorithms to analyze historical network performance data and forecast future values of key performance metrics. This allows network management teams to right size the connectivity by either upscaling network performance to meet high-demand requirements when employees and customers are likely to need it or downsize to optimize spend and avoid wastage.
Health checks for best practice compliance
Often underlying problems on a network can become bigger issues and, as many network teams suffer from alert fatigue, these problems can be overlooked. To improve adherence to best practice, a health check dashboard provides real-time oversight of the network experience and identifies potential anomalies or issues and alerts the network teams to these before they become significant problems.
Further, these health checks can also run regular compliance checks across the network to make sure that licences, for example, are not due to run out or ensure that the system is not about to run out of memory. As compliance checks are run on a continuous basis against best practice standards, the AIOps solution will provide alerts well in advance of these issues occurring, helping teams to address them before they become major problems.
This allows organizations to maintain high levels of resilience and performance due to the proactive identification and resolution of issues which are addressed before they impact the user.
Best practice in regulatory compliance
While AIOps strives to enhance and maintain network performance and security with proactive observing, predicting and resolving issues, it can also be useful in helping organizations meet regulatory compliance requirements. For example, the solution can monitor for compliance violations from spotting unauthorized data access to identifying non-compliant behavior. AIOps can also help enforce policies by automating responses to alert relevant teams to non-compliance and is useful in managing capacity planning and availability of the network to help support part of the DORA regulations for example.
In this way, AIOps can be a valuable resource in helping organizations meet some requirements for best practices in regulatory compliance, proactively alerting them to potential non-compliance risks and issues.
Enhancing network efficiency and security for best practice support
In today’s global competitive business landscape, companies must operate efficiently, deliver high-quality services and ensure compliance with industry standards. However, with organizations relying so heavily on their networks to deliver best-in-class service and meet customer needs, networks must provide reliable, consistent connectivity that delivers a seamless experience for employees and customers alike.
AIOps works in the background to help networks run smoothly, monitoring for issues, predicting threats or times of high-demand requirements and responding to threats in real-time to prevent any downtime or disruption. It is through this seamless and efficient tool that organizations can get on with the business as usual and improve employee and customer satisfaction levels.
By implementing an AIOps tool organizations can adhere to best practices in network management and security, ensuring efficient operations and a robust security posture.
