BT’s Chief Architect, Neil McRae, recently said about 5G operations, “It’s automate or die; we have to automate everything”.
Automation is certainly a key ambition in the digital society, with software defined networks and zero trust being popular buzzwords in digital at present.
Is automation a reality yet?
Automation, however, is something that is still embryonic at present; without a full understanding of your information and its importance, how can you truly trust the decisions to a system?
Until you are able to identify systems individually, understand their importance or ensure their availability, the process towards automation will simply stall.
Moving from islands to a community
The barriers towards identification of systems is severely hampered by the lack of adoption of IP version 6 (IPv6) (which identifies systems uniquely), rather than the current IP version 4 (IPv4) ecosystem) which connects islands of private networks across the internet using network address translation).
A recent study detailed that the split in IPv4 and IPv6 is reaching a tipping point, with operators under increasing pressure to support dual stack running between both IPv4 and IPv6.
Although IPv4 ran out of available addresses in 2018, many networks are still reliant on connection of network islands rather than truly interconnecting systems in a network community.
Protecting the community is harder than you might think
Beyond the lack of migration to a network community, we still place artificial barriers with network perimeters that increasingly convey encrypted traffic mandated by regulations between applications; this results in lack of understanding what providers are routing, and not enforcing network security.
With recent surveys suggesting that 78% of providers are looking at adoption of Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) to assist with automatic, the death knell for traditional network security approaches is arriving. SDN itself though, is often problematic at managing from a service assurance level and it is entirely feasible that approaches that protect data payloads whilst retaining visibility of the network routing may be the natural evolution of SDN and automation of networks.
The data can help in the process towards network automation
A way to address this will be understanding the requirements for protection and availability, much of which comes from the information flowing between applications and systems across the networks.
The various legal and regulatory frameworks do influence the service assurance and data retrieval requirements, which is a key step for customers to take prior to looking to adoption of SDN or assessing the risks.
The challenge of unknown “Dark Data” is very real as recent studies have shown that more than 60% of organisations don’t know about more than half of their data, which means that they are missing out on how to better understand the needs of their network.
Addressing the challenges
Without working with customers, providers are likely to be selling a lot of services that deliver little in real benefit without addressing significant challenges:
- Customers don’t feel the need to move from IPv4
- Customers are being sold services that make perimeter security redundant
- Customers are failing to understand the dark data
What’s the benefit from addressing the challenges?
A deeper level of understanding of information is going to allow organisations to manage the risks better when talking about disruptive technology such as cloud and smart cities. Governance of information also aligns with the application-centric strategy of government, where the GDS blog talked about ‘The Internet is OK’ , the for-runner of the Government’s Zero Trust Networking approach. The intention here has been stated to adopt Zero Trust Networking and dismantle networks within the Public Sector. Looking beyond the headlines, there’s much to commend from the principles and the linkage into the network principles. Innopsis’s view is to take a hybrid approach, with the adoption of Zero Trust across the network, but maintain MPLS based networks for the major offices and data centres.
Understanding the information an organisation holds means understanding what levels of service assurance is required, something that is increasingly important as we become more reliant on cloud services, whereby outages to the service or the connectivity to it has more impact to operations. Understanding what you don’t know is part of the journey to adopting disruptive services
Greater levels of understanding lead to being better placed to safely adopt technologies that people are often wary of, as they’ve been taught for so long that they have to keep things secure behind big walls. The reality of life is that this approach is no longer sustainable. We’re seeing more progress towards security at the application layer, rather than relying on the network. However, if you don’t understand information that’s flowing across those services and applications, how can you really get the best out of these technologies?
Summary
5G has much potential, yet that potential is only going to be realised with the barriers to creating network communities being removed. Addressing those challenges will create benefits for both suppliers and their customers that increase the revenue streams and cost benefits alike.