Next-Gen Networking: From Reactive to Proactive

Digital transformation has become one of the buzziest of buzzwords. This podcast is where we decode and deconstruct digital technologies, strategies and best practices that are impacting the way companies deliver value to their customers. No buzzwords, nobs, Let's get to it. Hello everyone, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Digital Dcode, brought to you by Presidio and our partners and sponsors over at Cisco.

I'm your host, Alec Brust. Today I have a few of my Presidio colleagues joining me. My guests today are Andy Richter, Britney Bolton, and Steve Dischico. So welcome to the podcast.

Andy. I know that you have been on before, but I would love if we could just introduce ourselves to a little roundtable. Tell us a little bit about what you guys do here at Presidio. Awesome, Alex, thank you so much for such a warm reception here and I am willed to be back here on the Digital Decode.

My name is Adie. I am the practice director for Enterprise Networking for pre sales here for Sidio, and I am excited here to talk about networking today. Alec I'm excited too. Yeah, let's get into it.

Yeah, Brittany, Steve, do you want to give yourselves a quick intro as well? Steve, we can start off with you. Yeah, absolutely so, Steve A. Chico.

I am Andy's counterpart. So I'm the practice director for Enterprise Network on the delivery side. Wonderful, Thank you. Awesome.

I'm Brittany Bolton. I'm an inside solutions architect here at for SIDIO, so I support mainly our Central region, but I'm a huge network nerd at the end of the day, so that's why I'm here. Awesome. Well, yeah, thank you guys so much for joining me today.

And like I said, Andy, I would like you to kick us off with this because obviously you are the experts, so let's talk about this. It's hot on the industry right now. Next generation networks. Yeah, networking is changing, ALEC.

And that's the fun part about this job, the part that I know that my colleagues here are just excited to work with our clients every day on this and the networks that we're seeing changed today. It's a new world because we're seeing different features, different outcomes with these different solutions we see in the marketplace when we see next generation networking, So we want to talk to everybody about today. It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. So I want to kind of come in and define it a little bit.

And that we're seeing organizations having to adopt to networks with even more complexity, even more features. I mean, and the reasoning is is obvious, right, we see, we see greater applications, needing more resources in more places. We have people working from home, that does it. We still have lots of requirements for applications and uses of networks on campuses and IT departments are not getting bigger.

It's like it's it's it's not fair. That's what that's the world we live in. So we need so next generation networks are networks that we're helping our clients install today so that it helps our clients build larger, better, more sophisticated networks with less intervention and less efforts from the actual network administrators themselves. And there's there's a lot there to unpack, and we're only going to unpack some of this here in the Digital Decode today.

You know, when we're talking about you know how Brittany and Steve and I were going to talk to our clients and the public about this. We wanted to just distilled down a couple of things, right, you know, what are the major things that we're seeing coming out of Cisco networks. And there's but a lot of Cisco here that have been effective to move that needle to make things easier and better for our clients build these better, faster, and more complex networks without a whole lot more effort on their side, and things like cloud management, cloud monitoring.

Right, we've seen evolutions of many more management solutions than allow cloud. We've seen things like organizations adopt tent based networking with telemetry and automation. And then lastly, we see AI coming into everything right now. And we know that you know here Psidio and all of our clients know that AI is going to be built in in networking and looking forward.

But that's really you know, it's it's the it's the early days of AI and networking. And so what we're understanding is what are the initial features we're looking for. How is it going to help us and our clients build these networks bigger and better and batter batterer, meaning like networks right and not do it for a lot more money. So I guess I'm going to start by, you know, asking some of my friends here, you know, some of their experiences.

The reason we rolled together is I know we have a lot of great, diverse experiences. So so Brittany, you know you've been here a while now. Forgive me, I can't even remember how long it's been since we started working together. Here, talk a little bit about in modern times, how you've seen things like cloud management and some of these modern architectures and modern visibility.

How has it changed how your clients have approached networking and what are some of the what are some of the benefits that you're seeing kind of immediately and then in the near future. Yeah, so I'm going to age myself a little bit here. But back in my day, starting off on delivery, you know, deployments were a lot more hands on, right, We were hands on switches, copying and pasting configs and having to go to physically every site. And if you have a campus, you know, if you have ninety eight campuses, that can take a really long time.

And the whole time you were speaking, all I could think about was Mauraki. I'm a Muraki fan girl. Everybody that knows me knows that. You know, I've implemented at home at my church.

I just love the dashboard, right because not only is it easy to organize, it's easy to understand, but you can do pretty much everything you need to from one place. And I think we all know that that terminology single pane of glass is so abused, and so I'm not going to go ahead and say that. However, you know, you really can dial into the details in terms of application usage and troubleshooting and you know, seeing what's happening in your network in real time. I think that's a really big deal, as you mentioned, getting more for less, right.

You know what's amazing, Brittany, that just it's just a few years here, how much networking has changed just based on those platforms. You know. And you know, you and me, you know, we're both in free sales, and we both used to be in deliveries. You know, we both recovered.

It's a joke. It's a dig against Stephen Chico. Figure out. I won't hold it against you.

You certainly will everybody who's listening. Steve will definitely hold any dig against him here. Fun pretty you know, I think about our time and delivery, and I think about how long it took us to kind of figure out what happened. You know, how many times were we working with clients and something has happened.

Maybe it's something that's during a cutover, during a migration, or maybe it's just kind of enduring normal business hours, right, And how much time we spent kind of finding where the data is and interpreting which data points are important. You know, when we look at the six Cisco next Gen network in some of the cloud management and visibility solutions, you know, I think a lot about things like Sisco thousand Eyes in active probes. You know, when you see, you know, your clients out there, you know, Brittany using these kinds of tools.

How are tools like thousand eyes when using the conjunction with just regular cloud management from Rocky? How are people making these things again bigger and badder and faster and cheaper for everybody? Give me, give me something we see out there in the world. Well, I can definitely tell you the days of trace route and pinging and putty are pretty much gone.

So Andy, sorry to you know, sorry to break your heart on that, but you know, these days we have so much data at our fingertips, and when we think about hours spent troubleshooting, we can now maybe take something that would have taken four or five hours to troubleshoot and we can possibly solve it in half that amount of time and with less resources. You know, somebody like me, who maybe just knew enough to be dangerous, would have gone through my list of smarter people and said, okay, I mean over my head, who am I calling next?

Whom I call it next? And now you can take people that maybe we're at my level, and you can train them to interpret that data that's so beautifully presented and kind of, you know, help them troubleshoot faster. Right Does that sound? Does that seem fair?

It's totally a shift. I mean, if you think about again aging ourselves here, but gone to the days or should be gone to the days of going box to box, logging into a CLI, making config changes, checking things. I mean, the centralized management and logging. It's a real shift in the market, especially from the telemetry side and the thousand I side and all of these data points.

I mean, if we think about how we were checking on systems previously, it was SNMP and those sort of things. But it's really moved more to that telemetry streaming as well as getting things like we kind of talked about in the beginning with AI integration, Right, So what can AI help in this context is correlating all that data and presenting it to those that may not have as much experience. They can get that information and say, oh, it's already correlated all of these events and saying there's probably a problem here, go check that out, rather than you having to spend all those cycles getting to that point.

So it reduces the meantime to resolution dramatically. See. I love where you're going with this, dude. I mean, it's not just because I work with the every day and I've heard you say things like that in the past, is while we're hanging out, but I haven't heard you say that that.

You know. It's just that cuts the chase for me. Man. But before we get into the AI stuff, which I do want to done to dive deep on, I want to talk a little bit about where you touched on.

You know, it's not logging into ninety boxes anymore, you know, it's our engagements with the equipment, the infrastructure we're putting in is different than it used to be. You know, our clients are looking for the ability to make sure that their business processes, their business applications, the things that they need from their network they're really intending that they're going to actually get. And then if the network is for reasons in or out of their control, you know, unable support, that they want to know about that before the end users call.

So see when you're looking, you know at modern networks with centralized cloud managements and you know organizations who are utilizing things like these rich telemetry solutions like Cisco thousand Eyes, and they're actually doing you know, automation intent based network configurations. Talk a little bit about you know, what are the kinds of things that people are actually doing out there. So see you're because you're in there every day, see doing the doing the hard work with our clients.

You know, what are the things that they're asking for? What features and functions are you putting in to meet those requirements? To absolutely we distill it down really to I think it boils down to help me make an operator's job easier. Right, what can we do that makes managing networks at scale simpler, more consistent And when you think about the intent there.

The shift really is to more centralized control, whether that's centralized management, whether it's you know, the Catalyst Center or Rocky Cloud. Do those sort of things allow you to manage all these devices at scale, but they also allow you to configure an intent and validate that content or intent against what is actually pushed. So I think that's really one of the big changes is rather than going in and logging into a million devices and individually checking that configure is correct, or configuring each one individually, now you're logging into a central point and saying, Okay, here's what I intend for the network to do.

And there may be configuration elements that you're going through individually, but it's still you're pushing that out to multiple devices at the time rather than just a single box. So from an intent based perspective, you're really focusing on the outcome that you want to achieve and then leaving some of those finer details to the system to interpret. See, you set a lot of gray stuff there, and I want to die even deeper because I think there's so much there that we do that is so much available.

So when you see set intent and I called up, you know, business processes and applications and stuff. So I want to kind of put a pin there. So an intense that we're talking about is, you know, the business is going to say, these are the things that I need from my network, and it might be that I need this application to always be reliably accessible, and that might mean we have a policy on the sd WAN that says, you know, the application is prioritized over others and it should go over the more reliable link as a primary and the less reliable link as a secondary.

I can mean a lot of different things, especially when you get into a campus or a data center network some of these traditional switched networks that we're thinking about this as a new part of this next generation network. So when we think about that, and I think about service assertion and path separation, STEE, you know, you're in the real world in the trenches. Talk a little bit about what you see there and how you're marrying up some of these more advanced automations with some telemetry and visibility, and then the results you're seeing after a client kind of tells you what they're techniques to be in these scenarios.

Sure, absolutely, So I'm going to answer in two parts. So first things, I think there's a lot to be said, and especially with these centralized managements for intent in terms of config compliance. So again going back to the centralized management piece, there are components of these now that we can say, here's the configuration that I intend to be on these devices, and if it drifts from that, let me know and make sure that that configuration is what it is supposed to be, a golden config if you will.

But aside from that, I think a lot of the intent conversation can revolve around outcomes for the business. So from an intent perspective, you could say I want these two segments of the network to be isolated from each other, and I don't want to necessarily change the underlying infrastructure, rely more on overlaid networking and things of that nature. So from an example perspective, there's you know, customers and clients that we have that will say I want to separate PRIDE from DEV within the data center, for example, and from a controller, you can do that by saying, take all of these traffic flows that are coming through and steer them to a firewall and then make sure that all the traffic comes back correctly and allow for that that segmentation.

So see if we we're talking about you know, these the more detailed examples and use cases. You know, I know you're really a specialist when it comes to design Softwify networks. And thank god for that, Steve, because I love asking you questions about it. See when you're looking at some of the Softwified networks you've deployed and service and servis you've done, you know, talk about how you've married up you know, the telemetry kind of deployments that we've been talking about.

In terms of telemetry and monitoring of networks, That information up into the actual policy you're creating across you know, law automated software fre networks for your client base. How does it move the needle? So let me pairent this scenario. So let's say, you know, the customer has two main data centers.

They have security inspection points that they need to maintain, they're monitoring with thousand eyes for example, and really at the end of the day, their intent is to get traffic moved through a particular firewall without warrying too much about the underlying infrastructure, so they can figure their centralized controller to say this traffic needs to go here and from the modeling monitoring solution. You know, let's say a storm hits and we detect that through thousand eyes, and there's there's a downstate.

There's automation that can occur. There's intent there that and logic there that says, if this occurs, then automatically move traffic to this other firewall set or move it across this other path. So by the time that the end user actually logs on and see that this event has occurred, the network itself is already healed. It's already in a production state.

It's moved over. Things are green. You can go get your coffee and be happy and along your way and see. You know, the thing about it is is I'm always getting coffee, so I'm on my way there.

Well, it's funny because it should be that casual. It should be as casual as that. It should be as casuals that just you know, you're you've you've maintained your intent through through rich telemetry and automation, and it's as casuals get into coffee. And modern networks can and will be like that.

You know, it may not be like that for everybody day one once these features go in their environments because it's going to take some time to really get used to them, everything properly dialed in. But there's there's no reason that that can't be the reality for everybody. See if you put you mentioned something a couple of minutes ago that I just think is very fascinating that I want to dive into pretty deeply here for for a couple of minutes, and that is AI and how AI is going to impact the net working industry.

Obviously, AI is a rapidly maturing technology in general. You know, Chat, GPT, you only got big, you know, a little more than a year ago, guys. And as we look at this prospectively, we're just touching the tip of the iceberg. There are some features available today from Cisco that provide AI features in networking, but there's lots that are still in the roadmap that they're still coming down.

So, Brittany, you know, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit and I'm going to apologize, but not actually be that sorry. You know, you know, when you talk to your clients about AI and networking, are there particular features that are in use today or because there may not be that many that your clients are using today. What are you looking forward to? What are your clients looking forward to that is going to help move the needle to get people better, faster, more interesting, more complex networks and use AI to make it less expensive, less frustrating, less difficult.

Yeah, that's a really good question. So in terms of what I'm seeing to date, I don't have a ton of customers that are implementing it right now, but I know that, you know, the questions they're asking for usage around or the things they're looking forward to, is you know, simplifying again, I'm going to go back to this troubleshooting piece of thing, simplifying our troubleshooting process right and being able to have their end users call up help desk and know that they've already run through the basics of you know, is there a bug here that we already know that is exposed that we can run through.

Is there a security patch update that's needed? Are there basic commands that I can check in and kind of have a cheat sheet to right Whereas you know, back when we came up through networking, you just had to memorize them right again, aging myself a little bit here, and so the interest that I'm seeing in the buzz is kind of around. You know, how do we simplify that process and not have that phone call be you know, have you tried turning it off and back on? It's amazing, right that it is.

It is the last thing you said there, you know, preventing that phone call to ask that basic question, right, you know, giving giving the network administrators, network engineers, you know, one extra couple of minutes where they didn't need to answer one more question. When you think about how much time that could save across the industry, it is really incredible, and you know it's fair. You know, I've not heard a lot of my clients ask for a lot of specific AI features. In many ways, I get a sense that maybe they're not even sure what they should be asking for, right, Like, there are features today available in Cisco environments that are AI enabled.

You might be running a network today that uses AI. You don't even know what right things like on the mobility and wireless side, you know, AI assisted radio resource management. For decades now, radio resource management has been static algorithm based, you know, picking the right channels, the right power levels. Those can be implemented with a those of those can and are today implemented with AI with the right licensing levels and configurations.

Not a huge lift here, you know, to your point for the operational side, you know, asking chatbots for this kind of information, it is certainly going to be the kind of thing that we look forward to prospectively in the future that is going to help get people a lot of additional value. When I picked a new Brittany, I'm going to go back to pick it on Steve here. You know, Steve, when you're looking at what your clients are trying to get out of their networks, and I'm sure you're hearing about AI coming down the pipe and people looking for a new and updated futures, what are the kinds of things that you're expecting to be real business benefits, you know, when you're looking at as Cisco infrastructure that the customer has and how they're going to utilize AI to actually make it a little better, faster and cheaper for these organizations.

I mean, I think Brittany hit on the head. I'm going to double down on that. It's simplification. It's making the end users or operators lives easier, because, like you said, the networks aren't getting smaller there's more to do.

There's the same staff in place, there's more tools on their pay So what can the network almost like help me help you? What can the network do for you? It can help you take all that rich data telemetry that it's now being streamed and correlate that for you and let you know. Again the coffee example, Hey, this event occurred, and here's why user Joe's Wi Fi was bad this morning, and we've already resolved it.

That's the end goal. So the first callback for the help desk is to Joe saying, your WiFi is back from coffee time? Why did you we resolved that. Here's what happens.

We've shortened, We've shortened the meantime to resolution across the board for these for these end users, these administrators, these help desk analysts. You know, the whole place is better. Yeah. I mean, the last point I'm gonna make there is, like from an alerting prisonctive, wouldn't it be better to get an alert that says this event occurred and it's corrected.

Then, hey, this event occurred, go figure it out. I know, I know. And my favorite part about all this is that our clients, when their end users call in the first thing that helped us will be able to say is we've already narrowed down the issue. We've got the ticket to the right place because we have rich telemetry.

We've detected where the root cause of that outage is. We can see it's not the web server. We can see it's not our network. We can detect a BGP outage.

It's out there in the cloud somebody else. We've opened the right tickets so the end users know what's going on, high degree of confidence, and we'll have a good idea when the issue has actually been resolved. See you, We've caught a lot of ground here and there is just so much that these modern networks from Cisco that they can provide to our clients. And one thing I want to talk about is what you do in your job, and that is how do you make all this stuff work?

How do you bring these features to life? And I know it's one the challenge is your job, and I want to hear how you do it, so you know, how are you talking to your clients about clients we're looking for some of these features, cloud managements, automation, telemetry AI features. What does that adoption look like? How do you get there?

Sure, it's totally fair question, and I think there's a couple of scenarios. So if you already have modern equipment that supports these features, a lot of times it's as simple as just turning those features on or installing an agent such as the you know from the ninety three hundred and thousand Eyes and things like that. If you are kind of stuck with some tech det and you need some upgrades, then again it's pretty simple. Modernize your infrastructure and then integrate those features, turn them on, onboard them into the Maraki cloud, or install an agent.

I hate to boil it down, but that's really it. It's pretty straightforward, pretty simple. It's amazing that the hardest things like these advanced features are made so easy by Cisco because they've packaged them up in such a powerful platform that it can all come together so cleanly. Brittany, you know I'm gonna I'm gonna leave you with the last question because I know you're going to have a great answer and I can't wait to hear you talk about it.

You know, when you think about what you talk to clients about all the time and some of these new features, what do you hear from clients to problem that you hear and you think, yeah, there's one if they just knew how much better it could be with some of these next generation technologies. What problem is it that you hear? Because you know that clients listening out there. It's funny everybody has the same problems, you know, and it always makes everybody feel better when they know that there's some people like them out there.

So when you so think about those people out there who are listening for me, you know, what's the problem you hear all the time? Your resolved? A lot of times, you know, my customers have very similar problems. Like you mentioned, you know, a lot of IT teams just run very weak.

They don't have enough people to manage all of the devices and spend the time looking into issues if they arise, or you know, taking it that next step further and being able to prevent issues from happening and keeping that you know, centralized management and organization I think is a huge game changer when you're talking about a lean group of people and even things on like the collapse side. We'll throw this over to them really briefly, right, you know, when you talk about WebEx and all the capabilities that are available built in there.

You know, there's AI available for people with hearing disabilities. You can keep up with your meeting in real time. How cool is that? Right, that's a real world problem that we are helping solve.

I think that's great, Brittany. The INSIGHT's just incredible, and I just greatly appreciate the fact that you're both on my team here with me and Steve, and that you come on the Digital Decode and shared your experiences. Alec, take us home here. I'm so happy you've had us the Digital Decode.

This has been a ton of fun, very educational for me. Oh for me too. Yeah. If you told me like three years ago I would be having a fun conversation about next generation networking, I would have laughed in your face.

But no, this is great. This has been fun you guys, And you know, I am really excited to see where this goes because, like you've talked about this whole time, it's not a static thing, right, It's always evolving. So I'm excited to see how we are going to work with our partners and our customers in the future. It's excited to see where AI takes us in terms of next gen networking.

But this has been a great conversation, So thank you guys so much for coming on the podcast and I will take us home. So thank you everyone so much for listening. You can stay up to date with Prosidio by following us on LinkedIn, x and Instagram. For more information on the services we provide, you can visit presidio dot com and remember to rate, review, and subscribe to The Digital Decode wherever you get your podcasts.

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