To cope with the demands of the application economy, organizations are constantly adding new layers to their supportive infrastructure. And for every infrastructure layer that’s hidden from view comes a hidden risk to the customer experience, to reliable service delivery and efficient asset utilization.

Goodbye visibility, hello complexity

Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are driving these new layers of agility – and adding complexity. They make infrastructure expansion easy by providing a flexible pool of resources that have been abstracted from the underlying hardware and software. But that’s where the easy bit stops.

These new abstracted resources can’t be monitored or managed in the same way as their static networking counterparts. You can’t see the entire topology. You don’t know what virtual component is dependent on what physical component. And you can’t keep up with the frequency, scope and scale of all the changes.

SDN and NFV environments might be perfect for adding new capacity to cope with a peak in customer demand or the launch of a new application, but they are a disaster for traditional infrastructure management tools and techniques.

To safeguard service levels in a continually changing landscape, organizations need to redefine their infrastructure management to go beyond the initial layer of physical components. They need to see the layer above, and the one above that.  They need to see every virtual component and every interdependency.

Next-generation management for next-generation networks

Being able to visualize dynamic networking resources and topologies is just the beginning. Organizations also need meaningful metrics to help maximize capacity and performance while providing policy-driven automation.

The more performance data collected from SDN environments, the more automation can be implemented to prevent or remediate recurring events. This data can also enable smarter decision-making based on business and customer requirements.

To make the most of this insight into network performance and capacity, organizations need real-time auto-healing capabilities and greater collaboration between network and virtualization teams.

In other words, next-generation networks need next-generation infrastructure management solutions. Solutions that can manage the old and the new; solutions that can support multi-state, multi-vendor environments; solutions that can correlate monitoring with provisioning and configuration changes.

With SDN and NFV on course to become the backbone of the application economy, organizations need to ensure that every layer of their infrastructure – physical and virtual – remains in full sight. Otherwise they risk not realizing their full potential.

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