Intent-Based Networking
Building the bridge between business and IT
At Frolgate Technology we have been offering networking solutions for over one and half decades. We have teams of experts experienced in the design, installation, and support of networks from the smallest and biggest networks and from the simple to the most intelligent networks. We offer consultancy services that help our customers develop technology blueprints that address gaps in their communications infrastructure. We see networks as sitting at the core of service delivery and business competitiveness.
We position networks at the heart of the unstoppable evolution to a digital economy. Digitalization is changing the way businesses, partners, employees, and consumers interact at an unprecedented pace. Products and services can be customized, ordered and delivered at the click of a button using web-based applications.
Business data can be acquired, analyzed and exchanged in near-real time. Geographic boundaries between businesses and consumers are diminishing. And the network is at the center of communication to and between the applications driving the digital economy. Frolgate has transformed and positioned itself to deliver just that.
Applications are moving to public, private, and hybrid cloud environments and are now consumed as services, blurring the well-defined boundaries between the enterprise’s network and untrusted domains. Employees and customers expect connectivity from anywhere, on any device, to access information at any time.
Traditional enterprise and data center network architectures and their respective operational procedures need to evolve to keep pace with these trends. Specifically, the new network needs to:
- Enable new digital business initiatives, not hold them back. It needs to have the flexibility to quickly change in alignment with rapidly changing business objectives.
- Be easier to configure, operate and maintain in the face of growing scale and complexity. Current operational models are not scalable or sustainable.
- Provide full visibility in terms of how a network is operating and providing assurance that it is supporting the desired business initiatives and achieving compliance.
- Identify and neutralize security threats before they cause harm.
This is driving the IT industry’s growing interest in more intelligent networks, commonly termed “Intent-based Networks”. We have transformed together with our leading vendors to deliver intent based networks to help our customers save their customers better.
Intent-based networking (IBN) offers a significant paradigm shift in how networks are planned, designed, and operated.
In the past, tools were not available to declare the intent and translate it into the device-level configurations required to realize the desired outcome.
Instead, the network designer or operator had to manually derive individual network-element configurations to support the desired intent, such as,
“I want these servers to be reachable from these branches; therefore, I need to configure specific VLAN, subnet, and security rules on each device in my network.”
Intent-based network functions
Benefits of an intent-based network
These include improved business agility and operational efficiencies, better compliance and security, continuous IT and business alignment
Increased Business Agility
New applications can be quickly on-boarded in the network wherever most appropriate. The capability of an intent-based system to capture the intent of a new application in the abstract simplifies the process of providing connectivity and security to such applications.
Sophisticated integrity checks, automated configuration of the network policies relating to the application, and ongoing assurance allow infrastructure teams to confidently support the rapid pace of application development.
Improved operational efficiencies
An intent-based network is fully model-driven: Operators can express intent in an intuitive manner with easy translation into model-based policies. Once the intent is captured in a model, sophisticated consistency and integrity checks can be applied to ensure that new intent is consistent with previously expressed intent, or that intent expressed by different operational groups is consistent.
The level of abstraction and automation in an intent-based model also supports the anticipated scale increases in a digitized network architecture. Through its closed-loop design, an intent-based network also greatly reduces—or in many cases eliminates— complex troubleshooting scenarios that occur in networks today.
Standard changes to commonly recurring issues can even be automated while preserving the integration with IT Service Management (ITSM) systems, potentially yielding further significant OpEx savings.
Continuous alignment of the network with the business objectives
An intent-based network system allows the desired behavior of the network to be expressed in abstract, business-near terms: the what instead of the how. This capability helps ensure that the network is always fully aligned with the business operations.
Better compliance and security
Improved protection and rapid threat containment are actually one of the main benefits intent-based networking can deliver.
Continuous alignment to intent related to security and compliance policies should be a core objective of IBN.
Reduced risk
The abstractions, automation, and assurance introduced with IBN promise to reduce the overall operational risks of providing communication services between users, devices, and applications. Furthermore, intent-based networks significantly reduce the risk of network outages by predicting the impact of changes to the system-wide network state.