PRO+ Premium Content/Network Evolution

In the aircraft industry, engineers can model the wing of a plane; evaluate how airflow, the weight of the wing material and the fuel carried in the wing all affect the plane's performance; then determine whether the wing design meets strength requirements. All of this is accomplished using computing tools and analytics. Engineers assess the final results. They're not sitting at desktops drawing wing models or using calculators to gauge airflow. The networking industry, while not quite at that level of modeling and analyzing, is headed that way, as enterprises increasingly want to derive meaningful and actionable information from network data analytics. Technologies and concepts including software-defined networking, software-defined WAN and cloud computing are affecting network design and how companies do business. Networks, like airplanes, have a lot of complicated, moving parts, and we are just at the beginning of using new network data analytics tools that incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence to help ...