FEATURE
Morne Vermeulen, Engineering Lead at Redvine Networks adopting technologies that provide applicationlevel visibility, intelligent traffic engineering and integrated security controls.
Modern SD-WAN platforms can identify changing traffic flows, including new AI and cloud applications, and apply appropriate optimisation and security policies.
“ If we agree that traffic patterns are shifting, you need a technology that can understand and capture those new flows and then apply the correct traffic engineering and security policies to them,” said Vermeulen.
Visibility is the starting point, but the network must also act on that intelligence. Intelligent traffic engineering can optimise bandwidth utilisation and use existing data to anticipate future traffic patterns, helping maintain application performance across hybrid connections.
Security policies can meanwhile be applied according to context, whether traffic is moving site-to-site, from a site to a public or private cloud, from a site to the internet or between a user and a service.
This can simplify operations and reduce costs by making increasingly complicated connectivity environments easier to understand and manage. A modular approach can also improve infrastructure utilisation, allowing
CIOs to build networks that are more adaptive, secure and cost-efficient.
Simplifying the hybrid network
The challenge for CIOs is that adding more connectivity options can also introduce greater operational complexity.
Bakry argues that complexity has itself become part of the problem. Enterprises have accumulated separate technologies for networking, security, cloud, compute and observability. Managing these as isolated domains may once have been practical, but it is becoming increasingly difficult as AI enters the enterprise.
CIOs are therefore looking towards unified, AI-native operations platforms that can provide a shared view across networking, security, compute, observability and collaboration while preserving the appropriate controls for NetOps, SecOps and infrastructure teams.
“ What matters most is control – over where workloads run, how data moves, who and what can access it, and how experience is assured. That turns four separate problems into one architecture,” said Bakry.
Ganesh agrees that network performance, resilience, security and cost can no longer be treated as separate conversations because each increasingly influences the others.
The starting point should instead be the requirements of the business and its applications. CIOs need to determine which services are critical, how much downtime is acceptable, where low latency is essential and which locations require additional resilience.
From there, organisations can select the appropriate combination of connectivity, software-defined networking, security, automation and monitoring.
For African enterprises, the objective is not to build the most complicated network possible. It is to create one capable of adapting to rapidly changing business requirements while remaining secure, observable, resilient and manageable.
As AI, cloud and distributed computing reshape enterprise technology, that ability to intelligently connect users, workloads, data and machines could ultimately become one of the most important foundations of Africa’ s next phase of digital growth. •
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INTELLIGENT CIO AFRICA www. intelligentcio. com