2020 Programming

With networks and cloud architectures maturing and in many cases becoming more complex, and much of the enterprise workloads are moving out to the edge, network managers have to find ways to gain more control over monitoring and maintenance to avoid damaging outages and bottlenecks. One way to accomplish this is by building more intelligence into the network architectures that support edge computing to help take the pressure and risk away from the human interaction and relying on smarter technology to spot and correct anomalies. This is enabling network managers to spend more time on strategic networking issues and increasing the value of their contributions to the enterprise. MobileNOC CEO Frantz Civil discusses the technologies that are already contributing to this transformation and provides a peek beyond the horizon at what may be coming next.

• How sustainable are the networking infrastructures that have been hastily propped up during the COVID pandemic? What do network managers need to do moving forward?
• What’s the biggest challenge facing network infrastructure managers today?
• One of the legacy challenges for network managers has been the dashboard approach to monitoring and data collection, which essentially puts them in the tedious role of watching for red/yellow/green alerts. How is network automation impacting the process of traditional monitoring and how are admins and managers’ roles changing as a result?
• To that end, please explain the role of AI and ML in network management. Why should managers not fear that this technology is "going to take my job away"? What are some other technologies that can help the evolution of network managers (NLP and LONI)?
• How can maintenance become more predictive so incidents decrease and costs come down?
• What is some of the low-hanging fruit with regards to automating network data management?
• What is the future of managed services for network management?