Is Network the front end of the infrastructure landscape or backend?

As the IT landscape of every enterprise expands, the workloads are distributed across the cloud computing continuum (public, private and edge) instead of being concentrated in one place. On the other side, the users are no more accessing the IT systems (across enterprise applications and OT applications) from defined office locations like HQ or branch office or manufacturing plant or warehouse, but they access pretty much from anywhere.

So, the network connectivity that enables communication across the continuum and that enables users for anywhere connect to the resources/ services that they need, becomes the core part of the infrastructure landscape. The network has multiple parts now, namely the DC networking, interconnects, WAN, office network, internet connectivity and more.

Most of the time, the network is treated a backend component of the infrastructure landscape, with each of the part of the network designed to provide bandwidth, latency and availability, assuming static deployment of the workloads in the cloud computing continuum.?

Network team is any typical enterprise, do not understand and speak the language of applications and business processes, but still speak in terms of bytes to be moved and network latency to be managed. For enterprises working in the traditional ways, it was acceptable model, but with enterprises increase their level of digitization and reliance on technology for every business function, this is not adequate. Network needs to be much integral partner for the digital transformation. [It is not that every enterprise is Netflix and needs something like OpenConnect as a core technology in their technology stack]

With resources distributed across computing continuum and users practically accessing from anywhere, the network moves the bits and bytes but,

1. delivers the experience for the users,
2. assures the performance of the business processes,
3. provides resiliency of the technology services, and
4. ensures security for the enterprise.

So, the language the network team has to speak changes dramatically, so instead of asking simply questions like what is the bandwidth required between A & B? what should be the latency? they need to ask lot more business centric questions like,

1. What is the data that is being moved between A & B?
2. What is the expected workload in terms of volume over a period in time?
3. What is the sensitivity of the interaction to network latency, saturation, network jitter, etc.?
4. What would be the impact to the experience, should there a network partition between A & B?
5. What are the threat vectors in this connection?

Concepts like Context aware networking, intent based networking, business aligned network, bring in business context into the network and help design the network with dynamic behavior to meet the needs of the interaction/ connection. Network technologies like SDN, SDWAN, Wifi, private 5G, SASE, etc. are to be orchestrated to deliver the needs of the business applications essentially the QoS and not the other way around to talk about the constraints of the technology to the business. As the computing moves more towards the edge in scenarios like industrial IOT going beyond sensing and analyzing to actionizing, more closer collaboration is needed between business process designers, portfolio owners, platform services and network teams.

We are not in the era, where business has to work with the constraints of the technology, but it is more about how to innovate in the technology space to deliver compelling business capabilities and experiences. To realize this, the change has to start from the network team to understand the business that they serve and the value that currently they are bringing and how can they transform themselves to deliver more.

Reimagine as Network is that which delivers the experience of the technology services and is not that just connects the resources.