How Intent-Based Networking bridges the gap between Business and IT?

Intent-Based Networking (IBN), with ‘Intent’ being the keyword, is an emerging technology concept and powerful networking solution to achieve business goals.

It’s a well-known fact that future networks (5G and beyond) will be highly complex. With billions of connected devices, sensors, smartphones, and industrial and massive IoT connections, these networks will be difficult for service providers to manage.

Without automation, AI and analytics in network operations, it’s impossible for the human brain to comprehend the complexities involved in managing such networks, or understand how to provide a great customer experience.

With an increasing trend towards customer-centricity, operators are undertaking major digital transformation programs that embrace automation and newer technologies. Digital transformation requires agility and rapid changes in response to markets and economic conditions, so today you can’t have a static network – you need an intent-based network (IBN).

Cisco defines IBN (Intent-Based Networking) as capturing and translating “business intent into network policies that can be automated and applied consistently across the network. The end goal is for the network to continuously monitor and adjust network performance to assure the desired business outcome.”

The first wave of digital transformations marked the beginning of a long and complex journey towards zero-touch networks and service management.

However, there is still more to be done. This article will focus on how future networks will evolve and top-level business intents will be achieved with minimal human intervention.

What is Intent Based Networking (IBN)?

Today, implementing business requirements requires a lot of human interpretation and manual intervention to ensure the IT systems are meeting these needs. In most cases the process is lengthy, very resource intensive, and error prone. It does not meet the criteria for an agile digital business environment that has increasing numbers of systems, devices, applications, and services that need to be served.

Intent-based networking is networking technology that configures the IT infrastructure based on a business intent – a service request from the network administrator without any human intervention. It continuously provides critical network insights and constantly tweaks the hardware configuration to ensure the intent is met. It takes networking from a device-centric to a business-centric model.

Intent-based networking (IBN) is a form of network administration that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI), network orchestration and machine learning (ML) to automate administrative tasks across a network. The goal of IBN is to reduce the complexity of creating, managing and enforcing network policies and reduce the manual labor associated with traditional configuration management.

For example, an IBN command may look like this:

Allow accounting applications to access server ABC, but do not allow manufacturing applications to access.

The IBN management application will then determine which devices and routes match the business intention and make the appropriate configuration changes automatically.

There are already many examples of intent-based products in our everyday life. Think of virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant, who hear our commands and deliver what we ask for. Google maps and other navigational services are all intent-based, with users selecting the destination and leaving it up to the application to find the best route for the journey.

Fundamentally, an IBN is the idea of a network administrator defining a desired state of the network, and having automated network orchestration software implement those policies.

IBN is a stark departure from the way enterprise networks are managed today. Currently, translation is manual, and algorithmic validation is absent. Intent-based networking systems monitor, identify and react in real time to changing network conditions.

The Four Characteristics of Intent-Based Networking IBN

1) Translation and validation

The system can translate a given command or business intent into actions that the software can perform. Additionally, it verifies that the intent can be executed successfully in the first place.

2) Automated implementation

After a network manager defines the desired state of the network, the IBN software manipulates network resources to create the desired state and enforce policies.

3) Awareness of state

Another key component of IBN is its gathering of data to constantly monitor the state of the network.

4) Assurance and dynamic optimization/remediation

Using machine learning, the system will implement and maintain the desired state of the network, applying automated corrective action if necessary. ML gives the network the ability to analyze, extract and learn from data dynamically.

In a nutshell, IBN is about giving network administrators the ability to define what they want the network to do, and having an automated network management platform create the desired state and enforce policies.

Let’s consider an educational institution that offers off-campus learning courses to its students.

The institute broadcasts a lecture for a specific course from 10 AM to 11:30 AM on the third Wednesday of every month. For the lecture to broadcast without intermittent issues, the organization must do two things during the lecture:

1. Allocate more bandwidth to the broadcasting hardware
2. Control bandwidth consumption by other endpoints

The Intent-Based Network IBN breaks down the service request into actionable tasks:

1. Business Intent: Smooth broadcast of the lecture
2. Translation: Broadcasting hardware resources are identified. Script is coded to configure networking hardware to control bandwidth during the specified time.
3. Feasibility Check: The IBN runs a complete check on a simulated environment.
4. Policy Authentication: The network administrator approves the configuration changes.
5. Policy Implementation: Configurations are pushed to networking hardware for controlling bandwidth during the specified time.
6. Assurance: The IBN constantly audits for performance hogs and tweaks the configurations accordingly.
7. Reporting: The IBN reports on the network status, performance, and glitches to the network administrator in timely manner.

The idea behind intent based network management has been around for years just as SDN. Though the two technologies graze one another in numerous aspects, they differ by their fundamental ideas.

A software-defined network (SDN) is an IT infrastructure in which all hardware is configured by a central software console. An SDN aims at controlling the IT infrastructure with the help of software applications but an SDN operates on a device-centric model such as exporting flow data from a specific interface.

The goal of IBN is to create an autonomous network. IBN needs only the business intent. So it can frame and enforce policies, configure the network accordingly, and constantly check and tweak the network performance. Leveraging the cognition of machine learning with network orchestration is IBN’s unique selling proposition (USP). Above all, IBN operates on a business-centric model.

SDN primarily works on how a device should operate. On the other hand, IBN works on how to achieve the service request – intent by automatically identifying resources and configuring them.

The key areas that IBN helps deliver changes in response to markets, network events, and traffic increase/decreases, making digital transformation possible are:

• Accelerating design implementation by reducing response time from days to minutes.
• Managing complexity by reducing operational tasks to their simplest components and automates them based on expected outcomes.
• Reducing risk by eliminating human error from intent creation and deployment of specific configurations.
• Getting the specific data you need by extracting only relevant data at a specific moment.
• Increase reliability by making network changes faster and can be performed in production rather than taking down network components.
• Standardizing network segments using validated, best practice blueprints to rapidly deliver reliable industry-standard network segments.
• Improving agility by adapting to changes and new applications, avoiding major structural changes.
• Freeing IT staff resources by spending less time responding to emergencies and more time working on strategic projects.
• Surveying options puts design first and deals with vendor specifics like operating system quirks in the background when working with IBN.

An analogy to IBN could be an autonomous vehicle. The desired outcome would be identified as the destination address and input into the system. From that point forward, the vehicle would define the subsequent tasks that would need to be made in order to achieve that outcome such as traffic maneuvering and GPS monitoring. In essence, a functioning intent-based system would respond, automatically or by request, to a system event without human input.

For a detailed consultation on how IBN’s can be beneficial for your business, please feel free to reach out to us.

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