The time of “smart networks” is coming

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Developments in technology have changed a lot over the past 30 years, both in social and economic terms. However, developments over the next 20-30 years will be even greater, and this means that businesses and more generally all kinds of organizations are called upon to start from now preparing at least for the part of networking.

This is at least supported by Cisco, one of the world’s largest digital technology companies and networking leader, whose executives are talking about “smart networks” where many processes are done automatically, while the network itself has the potential on the one hand to anticipate the actions required to work smoothly and to repair few of the problems that are being encountered on its own!

The new generation of networks promoted by Cisco was at the center of interest in Cisco Live held this week in Barcelona. This is the annual congress of the American giant in Europe, where more than 14,000 people participated from the Cisco ecosystem.

Practically, Cisco continues to implement the strategy it outlined last summer, that it wants the networks that companies and organizations of all sizes are using, to become smarter. The American company presented in Barcelona solutions such as the Cisco Network Assurance Engine and DNA Center Assurance, which ensure that a network will continue to operate as it should, if any change has been in between. Another new solution was Meraki Wireless Health, which deals with the management of wireless infrastructures, where practically all the problems created are solved automatically.

These new solutions follow Cisco’s new strategy, which is determined to re-establish networking. Given that the amount of data that corporate networks or the network infrastructures of an organization, such as a municipality, have to manage is constantly increasing, it is obvious that needs vary. At the same time, devices that use the network and its infrastructure are increasing. And especially with the advent of the Internet of Things, the situation becomes even more complex, as thousands of devices can operate simultaneously on a network. Essentially, the automation of processes is more than a necessity, and there is a point that Cisco is focusing.

The American company talks about the need for a safe and smart platform based on 5 points:

• The first is that security is a basic and functional part of networking.
• The second is the need to “re-invent” network infrastructures. This means that there is a high degree of automation of procedures in a number of areas, such as, for example, “registering” new devices and managing user access policies.
• The third is the need to support network infrastructures that use different cloud infrastructures to store data. Now, there is virtually no business that stores data and “runs” its applications on a single cloud infrastructure, so Cisco is seeking solutions to provide support for such business implementations.
• The fourth is to make better use of existing data and of those that are created. Practically, Cisco tries to enable the data generated by the network to be used by the network to automatically take the appropriate actions to ensure optimum performance. Indeed, the more data is generated, the greater the degree of automation.
• The fifth is to improve the experience of the user and the client of the company. That is achieved with the greatest possible automation and utilization of data.

For the new generation of networking, Cisco uses the word “intuitive,” the Greek translation of which is “intuition”, but what the American giant means is actually the promotion of a generation of networks that will be intelligent and will know in advance what needs to be done in order to operate to the optimum level. As Cisco executives noted, all of this is largely based on software and applications, and they also emphasized that we are still at the beginning of this major change that is being implemented in the networking environment. As they also pointed out that -given the developments that are coming- the transition to the next generation of networking should begin immediately.

Source: www.cnn.gr