There's a saying that's trending this year: "Life is a wilderness, not a track." ”
The wilderness carries infinite possibilities, encouraging people to boldly explore and seek new changes. At the same time, it also means that you need to bear the confusion of no direction, pathfinding, and the cost of trial and error caused by detouring, so there is an urgent need for deterministic direction.
Over the past few years, we've seen thousands of companies embark on a digital transformation journey. The digital transformation and development of enterprises is also the search for a definitive direction in the wilderness full of unknowns. The network supports a large number of intelligent applications, and digital capabilities are fully implemented in enterprise scenarios, which is the cornerstone of digital transformation. Among them, intelligent network operation supports the sustainable development of enterprises' digital business.
As the network is built to a certain scale, the increasingly complex network architecture brings unprecedented O&M difficulties to enterprises. At the operational level, problems such as information fragmentation, difficulty in data interoperability, low O&M efficiency, and surging costs have been exposed.
If digital transformation is a field for enterprises to fully explore, then the upgrade of network operation capabilities is to help enterprises improve operational efficiency, find a path with the highest efficiency, and ensure business continuity.
The latitude and longitude are the indexes. At this time, the value of "maps" is highlighted.
The advent of navigation maps has allowed people to have God's all-seeing eyes when traveling in the physical world, avoiding the confusion and helplessness of exploring unknown regions. Today, in the complex network digital world, enterprises also need a "all-seeing eye" map to perceive the status of all aspects of the enterprise network with a unified view, and solve the complexity of network operations caused by increasingly complex IT technologies.
In the network digital map, there is the optimal path for enterprise digitalization.
Wayfinding: Digital transformation accelerates
The digital transformation of enterprises generally requires AI, cloud computing, 5The integration of next-generation information technologies such as 5G and the Internet of Things with existing services requires a lot of exploration, innovation, and trial and error.
In reality, more and more services are being launched and the network scale is getting larger, which will inevitably increase the complexity of the network and make O&M management difficult. The resources, manpower, and time invested by enterprises in digital exploration are limited, resulting in unnecessary drags on the business. Due to the inefficient network O&M, faults cannot be located for a long time, and it is difficult to ignore the ...... in the time taken to launch servicesThe time that could have been used for business innovation and market development has been consumed, affecting the speed of enterprise digital transformation.
The acceleration of enterprise digitalization poses challenges to network operation capabilities in three dimensions:
1.The breadth of information: the "eye" sees it all. The traditional O&M mode relies on a static network topology, and the information is limited to a two-dimensional plane, lacking three-dimensional spatial information and four-dimensional time scale information, so it is impossible to see the data traffic carried by the network and the latest real-time data of the application system. Incomplete information and lack of a global view will lead to a surge in O&M difficulties and costs.
2.Accuracy of decision-making: "Brain" is accurate. The traditional O&M model lacks an application visualization system, and the invocation relationship between applications, the network through which the service passes, and the application path are invisible, making it impossible to achieve refined and cross-site platform O&M. Once an application fails, and the enterprise cannot make quick judgments and respond agilely, the enterprise will face huge business interruption costs.
3.Speed of action: "Hands" are lined up quickly. In the traditional O&M model, even if a problem is located, the troubleshooting and repair process still relies on manual labor, which makes the entire process lengthy and inefficient. The topology view drawn based on discrete static data lacks necessary and real-time information, and cannot be configured and simulated in time to correct the network steering wheel based on frequent real-time changes in services.
At this time, enterprises need new tools and solutions to make the eyes, brains, and hands of network operations more powerful, reduce the cost of "detours", and improve the acceleration of transformation. Huawei's iMaster NCE Network Digital Map is a direct link between enterprise network intelligence and digital transformation.
Intelligent: Digital transformation goes straight to the direction
Huawei's iMaster NCE Network Digital Map is an innovative solution developed and commercialized by Huawei's data communication product line in recent years, aiming to build a unified IT digital twin solution, break through network O&M boundaries, achieve unified O&M across clouds, networks, and applications, and achieve multi-dimensional and multi-level visualization of a network. It deeply integrates cyberspace and physical space in a manner similar to traffic navigation maps, realizes holographic visualization from the network to applications, provides users with intelligent path navigation and intelligent optimization capabilities, and improves network operation efficiency.
To put it simply, Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map is a digital mobile phone navigation for enterprises, which can collect and manage multi-level network operation data in a unified manner, just like geographic location data. The specific operation scenarios and functions are like the "life service" in the mobile phone navigation, which can be quickly located and reached with one touch through intelligence.
In paving a direct path to digital transformation for enterprises, what obstacles have Huawei removed, and what role has technology played?
The first step is data ingestion.
Compared with traditional static network topology maps, Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map supports the construction of four-dimensional three-dimensional maps of networks, terminals, users, and applications, allowing enterprises to have a global visual "God perspective".
Specifically, Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map has open and diversified data access capabilities, which can be connected to network-wide devices or third-party systems to collect network devices, servers, applications, LLDP, MAC, ARP, and routing data.
The second step is cloudy**.
With the help of digital twin technology, Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map supports the most complete network path, and outputs multi-dimensional dynamic topology, search and positioning, topology restoration, path navigation and other capabilities through a map-based experience, providing global multi-layer visualization to help enterprises intuitively perceive the network.
For example, large and medium-sized enterprises have wired, wireless, and branch networks, and when network problems occur, such as service interruption, packet loss, and latency, traditional O&M needs to find them layer by layer, which is difficult and time-consuming. Huawei iMaster NCE uses a digital map to clearly display the experience perception of network elements, users, terminals, and applications, display the alarms and network topology of all assets, and quickly locate problems through global search.
At the same time, Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map also supports multi-cloud based digital twin**. When the system receives a service change, Huawei iMaster NCE intelligently generates a network scenario, completes the network path, automatically performs configuration simulation verification and load testing, and uses technology to verify the impact of network configuration modification on the live network. Sufficient prior verification can greatly reduce the impact of network changes on normal business operations and avoid the cost of service interruption.
The third step is autonomous driving.
In the face of the contradiction between increasing operational difficulty and limited operation manpower, it is the inevitable direction of network operation and management to use AI to solve the problem and make the network run on its own, maintain itself, and make decisions like self-driving cars.
Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map uses AI technology to participate in the early, middle and late stages of network operation assurance, analyzes and warns of cross-layer operation data, automatically analyzes, locates, and self-heals in the service process, summarizes fault causes in the later stage, eliminates hidden dangers, and actively perceives and implements intelligent operations, greatly improving network operation efficiency.
Taking enterprise office as an example, meetings, live broadcasts, etc. have become one of the essential applications of enterprises. These applications also put great pressure on network bandwidth, and network congestion will affect the user experience, causing problems such as meeting lag, intermittent sound, and picture delay, resulting in IT personnel being held accountable and VIP customers complaining. To this end, Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map uses intelligent control path calculation and in-band flow detection to help campus enterprises achieve rapid demarcation and positioning based on time and space dimensions, real-time intelligent tuning, and proactive early warning before the VIP experience deteriorates, ensuring the ultimate end-to-end experience for ** and VIP users.
As you can see, Huawei has fully unleashed its technological advantages and effectively removed the obstacles caused by static network topologies with technologies such as digital twins and AI. Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map visualizes the network in one map, demarcates faults in one second, and provides one-click optimization, eliminating the need for enterprises to go around and around the cost. Paving a more efficient digital path for enterprises in campuses, data centers, and wide area domains.
March: A rallying cry for digital pioneers
Since its launch, Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map has changed the traditional O&M model and attracted a number of enterprises from carriers, finance, manufacturing, education, healthcare, Internet, retail, transportation, and other industries. In the stories of these pioneers lies the definitive future of digital transformation.
Only by bringing real benefits to enterprises will the product value of the network digital map be further condensed, form a good transformation from technology to market, and play a significant role in the transformation process of many industries.
For example, in the financial sector, the degree of digitalization is high, and the digital construction started early, which also makes it face the challenges of complex networks and operations earlier. In the process of transformation, Zheshang Bank found that a single digital tool could no longer meet the three-dimensional needs of the bank's digital transformation. A single map is required to penetrate the overall architecture of all ICT resources of Zheshang Bank, which solves the problem of network data integration and visualization, and puts forward extremely high requirements for operation. Subsequently, Zheshang Bank and Huawei jointly built a dynamic network map technology foundation based on digital twins and network modeling, which is the power of technology pioneers.
Every new technology and new solution requires some enterprises to be industry pioneers and explore the unknown one step ahead. For example, in the field of government affairs, more than 20 leading organizations, such as Zhongshan Government Affairs and Wuhan City Brain, have obtained efficient and intelligent network operation services through Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map.
The digital foundation and needs of each industry and enterprise are different, and it is not enough to provide basic products, but also to provide customized services and solutions that are close to customers to promote the real application of technology.
According to an evaluation report by Frost & Sullivan (Sullivan), a world-renowned consulting firm, Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map has established strong positive perception and loyalty. A large part of this market success is due to the high-quality service experience provided by Huawei throughout the life cycle of its products and services. Therefore, with outstanding achievements in technological advancement, technical completeness, technical safety and technical efficiency. In 2023, Huawei's iMaster NCE Network Digital Map was awarded the "Global Technology Leadership Award" by Sullivan.
Many digital transformation practices should start with the intelligent upgrade of the network. In the application field of online digital maps, pioneers have accelerated their assembly, continued to innovate, and dismantled barriers, bringing a clear direction and path for digital transformation.
When more and more industries and enterprises have an all-seeing eye on Huawei's iMaster NCE network digital map and find a deterministic path to upgrade network operations, the wilderness of digital transformation, full of unknowns, will become a new continent full of opportunities.