Closed Loop Enterprise Networking: The Time Is Now!

Praveen Jain, Founder/CEO at WiteSand

In enterprise networking, with so many interacting product silos, the goal is to create a self healing or self-defending network. In other words, a network which automatically achieves equilibrium by taking feedback from what’s wrong, adapts to improve, and feeds it back to input. This is what is meant by the term Closed Loop.

In a previous blog we examined the complexity of the enterprise network. Imagine sitting in front of many screens, each interfacing with a different network product, each trying to close the loop independently.

The expectation of network operators is a network which delivers secure connectivity with maximum uptime to users and devices. A Closed Loop design is required to achieve this goal. Here are the essential considerations:

Consolidate

Every industry goes through innovations and then consolidation of these independent technologies into an integrated product which is often much easier to use. Think of the video recorder, camera, portable music player, and mobile phone. These were all amazing stand alone solutions in their day, but became more powerful, useful, and easy to use when combined into one smartphone. The consolidation of enterprise networking silos will confer the same benefits.

Gather & Understand the Signals

A network time machine would enable managers to access the signals which are telling you about anomalies, providing the ability to correlate those sources and apply the solution back to the network.

Apply Zero-Trust Security

Once we have consolidated and tagged signals, it becomes easy to apply core principles of security to be fed back into the same closed loop. In that way, the first layer of zero trust is provided by the network itself.

Leverage the Power of the Cloud

In the current model, you are faced with an array of consoles – one for each brand of network technology at each enterprise location you have. The result is overwhelming complexity. Ideally, all of those control surfaces would be moved to the cloud, with a single global portal. A network manager with such a system would be able to see it all and do it all, better and easier.

Delivered via the ubiquitous cloud, such a system provides the ability to observe these rich data sets with new signals, new use cases, and new factors affecting the performance of the network at scale.

Since problems and network patterns are not always specific to a single location or a particular user, the power of the cloud is to cross-leverage the knowledge graph. We are smarter, together.

Don’t miss the WiteSand Launch!

If you agree that the time is now for closed loop enterprise networking, please join us at our June 28 Launch Event to see a demo of WiteSand’s cloud-based solution.

If you can’t wait until launch, feel free to contact us today through our website.

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