Network Transformation: Where to Start?

Every IT professional, at some point or another, is tasked with laying out a plan to "upgrade" the Wide-Area-Network (WAN) that serves the pivotal role of interconnecting their company’s offices, users, and servers. Sometimes, these upgrades can be simple, but recently, driven by the need for a more agile approach to technology, these upgrades can represent a fundamental re-imagination of your network—or even of your broader IT strategy. But even with a holistic redesign, you need to start somewhere. So where is it that you should start?

The answer isn't as cut and dry as you might expect. Let’s look at the common starting points or datasets that you might consider choosing and discuss the pros and cons of each.

Macro-view of Your Complete Network

You can start with a macro-view of your company's network. This is often best done by gathering data from your Network Operations Center (NOC) for a broad overview, and then combining it with additional, granular IT datasets to get a complete picture. You'll be able to see things like:

• Different types of devices on your network
• Current topology of your LAN and WAN
• Utilization of IT resources and traffic patterns
• Any additional datasets you monitor through your IT Ops team

While this might sound like the place to start, this volume of data tends to overwhelm network architects and can drown out key data points that could indicate underlying issues that have gone undetected or unnoticed before. After all, if you are only considering what you are already seeing, you are guaranteed to repeat any mistakes that you've already made or to perpetuate any false assumptions from previous network transformation projects.

So, which subset of data should we focus on to be the keystone of our network transformation or redesign ? There are three key components (outside of the always-relevant budget and financials) that we need to take into consideration: Current WAN Circuit Inventory, Applications and Flows, and User Profiles. Let's dig into each one and see which should be our keystone.

Current WAN Circuit Inventory

For this dataset, you're looking for the most up-to-date snapshot of your current physical and topographical infrastructure. To do so, it's important that you have a list of all circuits and services contracted and running today. Should be straightforward, right?

Well, years of experience have told us it's not. Often, companies just don't have the insight into what they are currently using, or even what they are currently paying for. This is because IT teams rely on one of two sources for this information: what has been documented by their team, or what their vendors tell them they have. Nine times out of ten, internal documentation falls short of the full picture and vendor account managers are paid to sell you something, not to help manage your account; they never seem to have the answers, and when they do, they’re non-committal 'maybes'.

So, what to do? We’re going to need to have this information at some point, even if it's not going to serve as the keystone for our network transformation, but how do we get it? At Bluewave , we ALWAYS encourage our customers to engage in our Baseline Assessment process to gain visibility into their current circuit inventory from both a topological perspective and a financial/spend perspective.

Applications and Flows

If we're not going to start with the circuits themselves, maybe we should take a look at what rides on top of them: your applications and data flows. These are things that you're probably going to need to consider at some point. Network architecture can't be a one-time thing, and it's likely that your applications will continue to evolve over time as well. Often, the pain users experience around applications is caused by applications changing faster than the network design can adapt. One of the most recent examples of this was the shift to SaaS applications, which predicated the need for businesses to redistribute bandwidth from site-to-site technology (MPLS, Switched Ethernet, Private Line, etc) to dedicated internet.

If we want our network transformation project (IT Nx) to succeed, then we should examine what the transport is being used for. Some key data points to collect when looking at your applications are:

• Application Name
• Type of Server/Compute Resource (Physical Server, SaaS Provider, Virtual Server, etc)
• Location of Server/Computer Resource (Colocation Data Center, HQ/Branch Data Center, Public Cloud Provider, etc)
• Application Outage Impact to Business (from 'Minimal' to 'Critical')
• Type/Protocol of Traffic (HTTP/S, FTP, SSH, SIP, etc)
• Pattern of Usage (Constant, Daily Peak, Weekly, Seldom, etc.)
• Notes/Commentary (Latency Sensitive, Users, Lifespan/Runway, Dependencies, etc)

It's also important to look at "non-application" flows, such as documenting data replication motion between data centers, or frequent third party data flows, like Windows or iOS updates.

The reality is that applications are EXTREMELY important to planning a network transformation project, but they still don't represent our keystone. They are certainly closer to the keystone data set than the physical or logical architecture of your network assets, but are still too far removed from what the network is actually meant to serve: the business's users.

User Profiles

That's right, folks, USERS (and their profiles) are the keystone data set we need to start with to have a successful transformation. Everything we do in IT is to empower or enable end users to meet the needs of the business . No one, at least not outside of IT, goes out after a long day of work and brags about how great their company is because they have 'wicked fast MPLS'. Users experience a network's quality based on how well it allows them to deliver on their job function or how much it hinders them to do so; given that, we should start with that user experience requirement set and then fill in the technology stack to best meet it.

So, what do we try to capture when we look at user profiles?

• User Group Name
• Identifying Characteristic (Department, Job Title, etc)
• Is it a subgroup of a broader group? (i.e., Field Sales users are a subgroup of the Sales Department)
• Where do they work? (Which countries, corporate offices, home offices, client locations, coffee shops, etc.)
• What types of endpoints do they use for work? (Laptops, VDI, Smartphones, Tablets BYOD Equipment, etc)
• What are their primary business objectives?
• Which applications are mission critical for them to achieve their business objectives?
• Which applications are secondary (or even tertiary) for them to achieve their business objectives?
• Are there any specific regulatory requirements for them? (PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, etc)
• Any other considerations to keep in mind? (User group is BYOD for laptops, part of a subsidiary, needs access to partner and client networks, etc)
• What are the top five IT tickets opened by this user group?
• What do the functional group's leaders say is the biggest challenge for this group and how can IT/technology potentially improve it?

The biggest question I get asked when we roll out user profile planning to clients is: "How am I supposed to build these profiles? It's a lot of data." And it’s true that they take a high degree of data, time, and effort to complete, but there are several collection techniques that can get you off to a good start:

1. Existing Directory Services (such as Active Directory, LDAP, and/or HR employee directory) -- These already have users categorized from some logical perspective and often, in the case of Active Directory, include policy groups that give insight into what IT resources each functional group may be using.
2. Functional Leader Interviews -- Users’ profiles are an extension of their functional role within the organization, so understanding what each functional group is charged with, how they go about achieving those objectives, and what KPIs they benchmark their group against can go a long way to developing a user who sits in that functional group's profile. Information Technology needs to support the whole breadth of an enterprise and to do that well, you have to become external experts to every corner of the business's operations.
3. Internal Champions -- If you haven't set up an internal champions program, I strongly encourage you to do so. They can be one of the most valuable, bi-directional tools for an IT department. Internal champions are line-level employees from each functional department that represent the needs and experiences of their peers to IT; they also serve the important role of evangelizing IT initiatives within their peer group, driving user adoption.

This may sound like a lot of information to gather, but once you have a baseline of your user profiles, it will help drive agility not only in a network transformation project, but also in any IT transformation initiative. Users are at the core of everything IT does, so having detailed and updated user profiles in your ITSM platform pays dividends no matter the project.

Combining It All: The IT Rule of Three

Although user profiles may be the starting point for your network transformation, you'll need ALL of these datasets available to you to successfully complete your project.

This makes data-gathering the MOST important phase of your network transformation. If you don't have detailed user profiles, you will fail. If you don't have a documented application inventory, you will fail. If you don't have visibility into your current network assets, their costs, and contract statuses, you will fail.

So, how do we succeed? By remembering the Technology Lifecycle and avoiding the biggest mistake IT department's make when purchasing: rushing (or even downright skipping) the Identification Phase.

Avoiding the Challenges in a Network Transformation

Bluewave has documented the Technology Lifecycle to help organizations avoid the pitfalls that come with navigating the chaos that has been created by the rapid expansion of technology and the need for the constant adoption of new solutions in order to drive business agility.

Successful transformation projects require partners with a proven history of success and a healthy dose of fear from real experience. This may be your first adoption of a given technology, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to learn from the mistakes OTHER people have already made and subsequently overcame.

Technology vendors can be a great source of information, but their information is always presented through a single lens... IT IS THE RIGHT CHOICE FOR YOU. After all, they are focused on getting you to buy a solution or product, not evaluate IF you should buy it.