VMware Edge Network Intelligence: Powering Self-Healing to Ensure Network Performance

The tremendous surge of distributed workers now rely on cloud-based apps to drive their productivity and ensure business continuity. In fact, 95% of IT organizations have reported an explosion in real-time app traffic. How does this impact IT ops teams? Those who are armed with archaic tools are ill-equipped to troubleshoot the myriad of issues that arise across the enterprise each day.

In response, teams leverage VMware SASE^™ to radically modernize IT ops - enhancing connectivity and improving security across the distributed workforce.

Teaming SASE with VMware Edge Network Intelligence^™ - a next-gen artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) tool - takes teams' network visibility to the next level.

Providing a complete understanding of the enterprise system's behavior, VMware Edge Network Intelligence integrates big data, AI, machine learning and other next-gen analytics technologies - reducing your team's need to perform hands-on management. From detecting anomalies to performing automatic security incident remediation and self-healing, 99% of IT professionals report that AIOps delivers many benefits to their enterprises and by 2023, 75% of Global 2000 IT organizations will integrate AIOps to support their IT teams.

Using self-healing to drive improved performance across the enterprise

VMware Edge Network Intelligence specializes in self-healing, which has a lot to do with timescales. Let's dive into a few examples of how self-healing improves performance.

The first type is local self-healing, conducted at the millisecond level timescale, where local information is analyzed over a very short period. This is called Dynamic Multipath Optimization^™ (DMPO), one of the unique differentiating features of VMware SD-WAN^™. What's happening here? As an SD-WAN Edge faces local tunnel conditions and detects severe degradations - such as latency, packet loss, and jitter - at a millisecond level of granularity on a per packet basis, it takes corrective actions by performing per-packet steering and per-packet forward error correction and duplication as necessary.

At the minutes level timescale, VMware Edge Network Intelligence examines a tremendous amount of data over a set number of minutes. Analyzing local and global conditions, it tracks user experience for every end client and every business-critical app that those end clients are using, spanning every location to establish a performance baseline.

VMware Edge Network Intelligence can then detect sudden degradations from the baseline and determine the most likely root cause of problems.

Next, the system can program the network to take corrective action, such as rerouting traffic to a different datacenter or cloud entry point.

The final piece is the days timescale level. Here, VMware Edge Network Intelligence examines additional data - including configuration, benchmarks, or customer data - over a much longer period to automatically decipher different types of patterns. For example, maybe every day at 2:00 p.m., users in the East Coast of the United States experience major issues with a particular app. This helps IT teams understand that the problem resides with the app and not the enterprise network.

So, by discovering a pattern that's happening daily at a certain time, VMware Edge Network Intelligence can automatically construct the network optimizations and predict their benefits, and then suggest recommendations for taking actions against the network to correct the issues.

Leveraging self-healing to strengthen network security

Let's switch gears to explore a security example, which spotlights self-healing IoT security.

VMware Edge Network Intelligence helps in this capacity by identifying all the IoT devices across the network. It then baselines their behavior in terms of the destinations visited, the protocols used, and so on. Using this baseline, the system then determines when things deviate from this baseline.

So, for instance, within a healthcare environment, you wouldn't expect an infusion pump to suddenly start accessing Facebook or Google. However, if a deviation like that is detected, VMware Edge Network Intelligence can then pivot and take corrective actions, which could include programming the network access controller to deny or quarantine access to these devices, thus closing the loop.

Learn more

Want a closer look into how you can use SASE and VMware Edge Network Intelligence to ensure app performance for your distributed employees and ensure business continuity across your enterprise? Check out the dynamic webinar, "AIOps for SASE: Self-healing Networks with VMware Edge Network Intelligence," recently presented at VMworld.

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