Modernising Network Management: Why the Dashboard Is Taking Over

Our Network Solutions Expert, James Bunton spends most of his time at Bechtle helping our customers align with industry best practice. James took some time away from his desk to discuss Network Cloud Tools, and how Bechtle ensure our customers are taking advantage cloud managed networks to drive business change!

In terms of network management, your only option used to be the Command Line Interface (CLI) which is about as complicated as it sounds. IT managers that have been in the business a long time will be very familiar with this way of managing a network estate. However, the next generation of IT managers are coming into the marketplace with new ideas, and they simply won’t know, or have the experience of using, the CLI.

CLI is a learning curve and crucially they are very different for each vendor. 

Also, if you have multiple vendors in your Network estate and – for a variety of reasons – this can be the case for a lot of our customers, it’s going to take a lot more time to configure your network hardware and even simple tasks like applying security patches can be incredibly complicated. This is one of the leading reasons why customers either can’t or don’t have the time to keep up with critical security patches, leaving their estate vulnerable.

Now, if you look at cloud dashboards for managing your network devices, you can manage multiple devices all in that single dashboard. So, in terms of ease of use and user experience, it’s a seamless experience that cuts down on a lot of time.

When you compare the two, the difference is night and day. You really get a lot more in terms of features and analytics from a cloud dashboard. One quick example is configurations. So, you can create one configuration for a device and then push that out to the rest of your estate, very much like a push notification on your phone.

Whereas, with CLI you’d be doing the individual devices, one by one. So, in terms of deployment of configuration changes or software or security patches, a cloud dashboard gives you so much more time back in your day.

Also, when deploying new or additional hardware into your environment, it can now take minutes, whereas with CLI it can be a lot more time consuming.

One big differentiator is, if you’re using a cloud-based dashboard to manage your network, you’ll typically be accessing it through a cloud application, so you can log on and manage your network from anywhere in the world providing you have an internet connection. This is where cloud dashboards have really come on in recent years.

If we look at a practical application of that, say, you’re managing multiple sites, you almost certainly don’t need IT people permanently based on site anymore.

Not necessarily, some vendors provide you with a cloud management dashboard free of charge, and some will give you tiered options to give you a bit more flexibility. Not every network is the same, so you can scale and grow as the business needs, bringing in new features where you see fit.

No longer do you have to pay upfront for additional software to manage and monitor your infrastructure, which has been the situation in the past, as more and more we are seeing flexible payment terms to spread the cost of the network upgrades, or management licenses. So, while you are moving to a different way to purchase your hardware, you have the benefit of not having to purchase -sometimes hugely expensive – licenses for monitoring and management software, think ‘solarwinds’ or ‘PRTG’ or ‘wireshark’. Now, you can get all that functionality in one easy to manage platform.

In some instances, yes, if you think about cloud first and Hybrid strategies, you’re removing the need for physical hardware and utilising the resources supplied by the vendors and 3^rd parties. If you think about how, it has been historically, you will not only need the software, but also a server to run it on, and loads of storage to save all the data these tools collect.

Absolutely, and AI is starting to come into this conversation. Using cloud platforms that have AI or Machine Learning (ML) built in helps you move your IT department from reactive to proactive. These new tools will give you data driven suggestions on what is going on in your network and give you, not only, great insights but also tell you what the potential problem is and suggest troubleshooting actions you can take. So, in terms of troubleshooting, it’s just a lot quicker, again, giving IT managers and Network managers and engineers time back in their day to do more interesting stuff.

As a direct result of these new features, the user experience is a lot better as well. This is because, not only is the network proactively identifying and highlighting issues before they start impacting users, but it’s also dramatically reducing downtime making any actual incidents less impactful.

Yes, one of our vendors is built from the ground up focusing entirely on user experience as this is a key metric for running a successful business today. Their entire cloud dashboard is set up around user experience and provides actionable data to back it up.

So instead of looking specifically at the network, they are looking at how users are impacted by the network, even down to understanding what ‘roaming’ is like. Think about working in an office today, you may pick up your laptop and move to a meeting room, you may even do that while still on a Teams call (for example). Using cloud dashboards, you can build a picture of how that user is travelling through the network both electronically and ‘physically’ as they move between Wi-Fi access points around the building.

This is an absolute game changer in terms a user’s experience of using the corporate network.

Most vendors offer one, choosing to focus on one dashboard for all their products. At the end of the day these tools are designed to be easy to use and digest with minimal learning curve. One single source of truth.

There are third party dashboards you can use as well that consolidate data from multiple vendors if you have a ‘mixed estate’ of multiple vendors. Some of our customers choose to do this to remove the reliance on one vendor, or in some cases, it’s a pre-requisite for some security cases. In this instance you can use a third-party dashboard to give you that ‘single pane of glass’.

A good example of this are the tools Bechtle use ourselves. We need industry leading analytics in order to deliver the incredible service we do, to our Managed Service customers. Our customers really see the benefit here. Using our dashboards we are able to proactively manage our customers networks and remove the strain on IT managers, especially where they don’t have the resource to manage it themselves. We can step in and not only take over complete proactive management, but we don’t have to have engineers based on site, as we can do that all remotely.

A fast-growing business will generally have a lot of vendor products which will make it complex to manage, purely because you’ve got to be skilled up on all those different vendor products.

Also, let’s think about asset management and even relatively simple tasks like firmware upgrades and security patches. There’s a whole host of things you’ve got to do, and that’s assuming you have the time, resources and money to drive change and support business growth.

Consolidating your estate into one vendor and therefore one cloud management dashboard can give you considerable time back in your day. Also, if you consider that many vendor dashboards now have security tools included as well, you can make that drive toward a zero-trust environment. So, when you’ve got remote users, you can ensure all connections are secure, end to end and manage it all in one dashboard.

If I can expand on that a little, let’s say the business opens or buys a new site. Straight away you’ve got challenges of ensuring all those new devices are provisioned, updated, your policy configurations are pushed out etc and all as quickly as possible to ensure that new part of the business is up and running. Ahead of time you can easily ‘template’ your configurations and either push them out to the new site, or, if you’ve purchased new hardware, simply rip out what’s already there, install the new network hardware and generally you can bring those up in minutes rather than hours, or days in some cases, “plug and play” essentially.

Yes, think of this example, where you may have multiple branch offices. If you've got a cloud dashboard, then you'll still have the access to other sites. I mean, if one site goes down, or, worse still, the site you are managing your estate from goes down, you'll still have access to all the other sites in your estate, even if you have to fire up a 4G connection on your phone, you only need the application to manage your estate so, realistically, there would never be a situation where you’re not able to manage your infrastructure. Just think about how that will impact your availability and response service levels as an IT department.

It’s always developing. That is the beauty of cloud platforms, new features can be rolled out quickly, meaning users can get their hands on improvements almost instantly as they are released.

Also, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the biggest development at the moment and is impacting everything in IT, including networking. The availability of vast amounts of data storage, at a relatively low cost, has allowed vendors to implement Machine Learning (ML), where algorithms are able to analyse and interrogate data to find trends and patterns in data that humans would struggle to correlate. This has created a wealth of very valuable data that can be leveraged to help manage a modern network effectively and efficiently.

Artificial Intelligence has evolved and built on the foundation of Machine Learning to create networks that are self-optimising, self-healing and can be integrated using human-friendly language as opposed to hugely technical command line statements.

Another thing to keep an eye out for the future is, vendors have realised that not all customers want their data in the cloud, or simply don’t like a subscription model. For example, if you are a Public Sector organisation or in Defence, data sovereignty is going to be extremely important for you. For those reasons, vendors offer on-premises versions of their cloud platforms, free of subscription charges and these can be kept in a customer’s datacentre or on site. Private Cloud is also a play here, but I will leave that conversation to our Cloud specialists!