In recent years, the development trend of network management has also undergone some changes. In the past, the enterprise network usually adopted the local area network technology, which made the employees in the enterprise keep in touch with each other. With the advent of the Internet age, a closer connection with the outside world is required. Wi-Fi then took over. Businesses now need to provide robust wireless LANs and help remote employees establish a good connection to the network. Edge networks are all around people now.

Here are some key trends in network management:

1. The proliferation of edge networks

The network edge is one of the hottest areas in the network today. According to a study on the fringe internet economy by research firm Chetan Sharma Consulting, by 2030, the market size of the global fringe economy will reach $4.1 trillion. This has significant implications for network management. Not only must an enterprise's IT team manage LANs, Wi-Fi, remote connections via VPNs and other traditional duties, but they must also be able to monitor, maintain and manage the expected many edge devices and small data centers.

For example, telcos are investigating the possibility of combining edge data centers with their cellular towers to be able to send data to on-premises facilities and central points, aggregate the data and store it for a period of time. Autonomous vehicles will also require numerous edge services to be able to monitor the various factors required for safe and efficient transportation. The adoption of IoT technology is also required, with tens of billions of IoT devices currently connected to global networks. This will translate into huge demand for edge processing.

2. The need for partners

As networks become more complex, as edge computing grows rapidly, and as the Internet of Things gains momentum, it's becoming increasingly clear that no single enterprise can do it all. As a result, network management vendors are partnering with edge computing and IoT experts. IT vendors are building closer relationships with network vendors to meet the demands of changing network architectures. Businesses are looking for every help they need to be able to integrate edge computing, IoT and other data into their business operations.

According to a 2021 study by Informa, 20% of business leaders are already looking for the right delivery partner for IoT and edge computing services. This number has increased significantly over the past year.

3. Containerized Networking

Mike Mulica, CEO of Alef, said more and more businesses are using third-party infrastructure to create custom services. These managed functions provided as services are being orchestrated into specific business logic. For example, businesses can access the Docker registry with many software features packaged as containers that will be orchestrated into worker applications using Kubernetes.

"Because there is no specific device associated with the service, the network management system has no idea about service availability," Mulica said.

Therefore, network management systems will have to deal with the challenges of these containerized networks.

4. Get rid of device-centric management

The traditional network management system is built mainly to deal with device management functions and how to provide services to these devices through the network. Services are provided by the device and are available as long as the device is up and running. But this long-term approach is changing due to trends such as virtualization, software-defined networking, cloud computing, and edge computing.

"The relationship between services and devices is being decomposed, and existing network management frameworks must change as new frameworks are developed and implemented that span different layers of the stack and provide connectivity across multiple domains in a multi-cloud environment," Mulica said. Coordination. Solving this problem requires understanding how hosting and connectivity work and how they can be used to create new services, which leads us to rethink network management as service orchestration.”

As a result, network orchestration vendors are showing increasing interest in their products. In addition, many of these vendors, as well as legacy network vendors, are pushing the as-a-service market to bring new types of network management to market.

5. Artificial intelligence and analytics drive network management

AI is being incorporated into more and more applications and workloads. But there's a major networking issue holding it back. It will take a long time to connect AI systems to data at the edge. If the architecture is too centralized, it can take up to an hour to process the data locally, transfer it to a central AI system, analyze it, and then transmit the results or instructions to where it is needed.

This might work when businesses are dealing with sales forecasts for the next quarter, but fail miserably when real-time workloads (such as self-driving cars, financial fraud systems, etc.) are in play. The required network changes are to enable data to be processed and analyzed at the point of creation without having to be transmitted to a central data center. This means that edge data centers have a lot of processing power.