Oftentimes, IT can be siloed. But no single person knows everything and no manufacturer is the best at everything. That’s why organizations need a holistic strategy to ensure the performance and security of their infrastructure and to cope with the management challenges of highly distributed applications, data users and devices.
As Cisco has stated “It should be possible for IT and business intent to be expressed in one domain and then exchanged, enforced, and monitored across all of them.”
In other words, you should be able to define once, enforce and monitor anywhere with any user and any application.
4 elements of an integrated network
An integrated, connected IT infrastructure includes the following key elements.
Automation – Automate identity-access management from users to applications to reduce human error and provide more consistent performance.
Assurance – Help ensure a great application experience through continuous monitoring and verification.
Threat detection & mitigation – Identify problems faster by correlating applications and data. Automate visibility, threat detection, and mitigation across all domains.
Consistent policy – Extend consistent access control to all sites of the organization across wired and wireless networks to allow users to work from anywhere they choose.
How to benefit from network integration
Offering a consistent, connected experience across all users and applications can provide your organization with the following benefits.
Agility – Through automation and open APIs, new business requirements can more easily be captured and translated into policy.
Efficient operations – After network operators express intent, translation into policy and configurations is automated.
Better alignment to business intent – Continuously validate policy alignment and recommend adjustments to meet your business’ changing needs.
Improved compliance – Advanced segmentation, policy enforcement, rapid threat detection and containment help provide corporate security and compliance.
Reduced security risk – Abstractions, automation and assurance reduce inconsistencies and outages across the network.
Whether you get best-in-breed point products and integrate them or find a manufacturer that has products in multiple domains and negotiate an agreement that rewards your loyalty, integration is critical in ensuring you get the most out of your IT. To learn how CDW can help you maximize your data centre and network infrastructure, visit this page.
