Digitally transforming into an intelligent work campus

There has become a need for organisations to move towards a digital future for both internal staff and customers. The digital transformation will create a highly competitive environment that provides intelligent insights and collates information, using a mixture of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI).

Today’s IT architectures are much larger and more complex than they were five or ten years ago, generating high management and maintenance costs. Gartner says it is mostly funded through the capital budget. About 73 percent of all IT spend comes out of opex and will rise to 86 percent in 2018.

Traditional operations and maintenance (O&M) can no longer bear the increasing workload, and manpower can’t be increased at the same rate as the network scale. This makes network O&M a problem that must be dealt with for enterprise development.

To overcome this issue, enterprises shift their attention to AI, using machine learning and algorithms — sitting in the cloud — to solve the problems encountered during digital transformation.

This has brought innovations like cloud systems to the top of the must-have list for businesses. Where they once looked at whether they should migrate from a data warehouse to cloud, the conversation has now become around what type of cloud they should use.

According to Gartner, by 2020, a corporate “no cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no internet” policy is today. Additionally, by 2019, more than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors will have shifted from investing primarily in cloud-first technology to cloud-only technology. Those companies stalling their move to the cloud will only create a gap that their cloud-ready competitors will be able to fill.

However, cloud computing comes with its own challenges. And for organisations to have a smooth transition they must understand that like any new technology, the adoption of cloud computing is not free from issues.

Many IT decision makers must look at a variety of issues when moving applications to the cloud. Key factors, such as an application’s scalability, security and compliance concerns, and manageability, all come into play when making the cloud migration decision.

According to Huawei’s 2017 Global Connectivity Index survey of 3,000 enterprises from a range of industries, connectivity enables enterprises to break regional boundaries and respond to customer needs quickly. This improves their productivity, efficiency, and competitiveness in the marketplace.

With the development of enterprise services, networks have been deployed in every part of enterprises. A large office campus may involve hundreds of switches, thousands of APs, and tens of thousands of users. The need for wireless-first has become the norm across all industries. Organisations, headquartered in one country are needing to provide the same access to its network workers situated in another region.

But due to the complex nature of having a disparate environment, the experience of users and application are always invisible and not in control. ITMs are facing daily complaints when there are more demands being made for a business department to move to a mobile workspace.

How can an enterprise measure the running status of the network comprised of so many devices? What is the network experience of each network access user and the network status of terminals and system applications accessing the network? Are there any users who cannot access the network? Is the quality of network services poor? Is the fault a single point fault or a group fault?

Traditionally, networks rely on employees to report faults, which O&M personnel then locate and onsite personnel rectify. In this case, the network is in an unmeasurable state, and network personnel are constantly worried and must be ready to rectify faults urgently at any time. The fault rectification efficiency is low due to various scenarios.

This is where Huawei CloudCampus can help organisations make the right steps into the cloud and bring networks together. The solution includes programmable switches for enterprise, and helps enterprises build future-proof wired/wireless networks that feature uncompromised user experience, automated service provisioning and operations and maintenance (O&M), and converged access.

Huawei Intent-Driven CloudCampus adopts the ‘Intelligent, Simplified, Converged, Secure, and Open’ design concepts. There are two campus modules: the campus network insight engine CampusInsight and the campus network automation solution Software-Defined Campus (SD-Campus).

CampusInsight helps build a predictive, self-healing, closed-loop system with added visibility for each user in real time. SD-Campus implements full-lifecycle automation of physical and virtual networks from planning and deployment to O&M.

Released in March 2018, Huawei’s Intent-Driven CloudCampus includes new components:

• CampusInsight (Campus network insight engine): By leveraging telemetry technology, CampusInsight collects network and application data from network devices in real time and on demand. Big data and AI technologies are used to implement network fault analysis and proactive prediction, and up to 85 percent of potential issues can be automatically identified.
• SD-Campus (Full-lifecycle campus network automation solution): Designed for medium- and large-sized campus networks, SD-Campus leverages software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud technologies to automate network deployment, rollout of virtual networks, and user/application-oriented policy management. These features help to reduce OPEX by 80 percent.
• New agile switches S5730-HI and S6720-HI supporting SD-Campus: These fully programmable agile switches, built on Huawei’s Ethernet Network Processor (ENP) chips, implement wired and wireless convergence through the native Access Controller (AC) function and support SD-Campus scenarios.
  • Huawei S5730-HI is a next-generation agile switch that supports all-gigabit access.
  • Huawei S6720-HI is the industry’s first fully programmable fixed switch with 100GE uplink ports for campus networks.

As digital transformation drives enterprises to roll out their businesses at a higher speed, networks will need to respond quickly to market and operation needs, creating unprecedented challenges for networks.

Huawei CloudCampus will continue to evolve based on the IDN philosophy and gradually will add more solutions and products to adapt to more specific application scenarios.

In doing so, Huawei aims to make campus networks understand enterprise users’ business intent and implement automatic, intelligent network deployment and management, laying a solid foundation for the enterprise digital platform.