Using AIOps to Enable Self-Healing SD-WAN

Complex SD-WAN environments, with hundreds of locations deployed by large enterprises or managed by service providers, can overwhelm IT teams. In such environments, even centralized management systems can be too slow and too cumbersome to see and respond to the demands of large numbers of network edges and end users.

Many organizations rely on automation to ensure reliable connections, consistent cloud on-ramp, and dependable VPN connections in large SD-WAN deployments. But most automation is only able to take care of the low-hanging fruit. The system still relies on a team administrators and systems analysts to keep everything running efficiently, and that approach is neither scalable nor sustainable.

Automation Alone Isn’t Enough

To keep up with demand, a growing number of organizations need more. They need a solution that can both detect and respond to any sort of impairment, anywhere on the WAN, and that requires more than simple automation. Leveraging AIOps to infuse machine learning into IT operations increases the level of automation. Such a system can automatically observe granular application performance, monitor transactions, and apply WAN analytics to make sophisticated decisions, ensuring the best possible connection—combined with the ability to make critical changes when needed to maintain optimal user experience.

AI Enables a Self-Healing WAN

The challenge with many SD-WAN solutions is that they still rely on manual configurations. However, tweaking and tuning the network by hand to adapt to business changes can be time consuming, slow, and error prone. Adding AIOps, especially to large and complex SD-WAN deployments, enables automatic detection and response across all connections, not only to identify issues, but to also remediate them in real time—before an application or user is impacted.

AIOps provides capabilities designed to determine configuration errors and anomalies and to provide assistance with troubleshooting. It is also able to learn traffic patterns and then make real time decisions and recommendations to optimize the network based on those patterns.

An integrated AIOps system is able to consume and process large data sets to detect even minor WAN impairment and then introduce a sensible response to protect application performance, ensuring the application is available to users whenever they need it. The result combines reliability, connectivity, application prioritization, and performance SLAs with WAN impairment functions to normalize, balance, or correct traffic, creating a self-healing WAN solution.

AI must be Coupled with a Robust Secure-SD-WAN Solution

Of course, AIOps can only provide these capabilities if the underlying SD-WAN solution is providing functions such as forward error correction, per-packet load balancing across different interfaces, and packet duplication that can be leveraged by the AI system. And to complete the system, AI will also need access to advanced routing functions, such as IPv6 and multi-cast. Combining a full stack of advanced connectivity and routing functionality with AIOps ensures that the SD-WAN environment is able to establish connections, move traffic and applications around as efficiently as possible, and simultaneously ensure there is no end-user impairment—even when corrections are made along the way.

By processing those events using Machine Learning, an AIOps-based system is able to increase the efficiency and efficacy of its detection capabilities and refine its response with more intuitive decisions. The system then needs to link all events and changes back into the central management system so systems administrators can see and look into major or persistent issues, refine any rough fixes made by the AI system, and make additional corrections or fine-tune configurations to improve overall functionality. And over time, a true AI system will be able to refine its fixes, eliminating even that nominal oversight by a human administrator.

Another advantage of an AIOps-based WAN is that it allows changes to be made at the moment an event occurs, not later when an administrator is reviewing metrics and events. Addressing and recording connectivity anomalies and security events in real time ensures that connections are reliable and user experience remains optimized. And being able to review them later, when there is time for meaningful assessment, helps administrators make more meaningful decisions about refining policies and procedures to further protect and preserve application performance and maintain availability.

In addition to streamlined and more efficient SD-WAN operations, another valuable outcome is reduced costs—all while improving end user experience. By implementing a single solution that combines SD-WAN functionality, security, and advanced routing with integrated AIOps, organizations can not only eliminate the cost and overhead a multi-device WAN solution requires, but also the complications that a traditional SD-WAN solution can introduce.

For example, in addition to managing the advanced connectivity functions an SD-WAN solution provides, security also needs to be deployed as an overlay system. In traditional deployments without integrated security, this requires deploying, configuring, and managing a whole host of additional devices. And all of that needs to be done manually. Multiply that across a large number of remote locations, where interconnections can multiply exponentially, and you can see how managing a large SD-WAN deployment can quickly scale out of control.

Adding AIOps to a Centralized Operations Center

Integrating all of that functionality into a single, easy to deploy device—connectivity, advanced routing, and a full stack of security—combined with AIOps to ensure consistent performance and reliability, takes much of that headache away. And it can be taken to the next level when all deployed SD-WAN devices are tied together through a single operations center.

A centralized management console needs to be able to see and orchestrate connectivity, as well as manage advanced routing and security functions, all through the same pane of glass. When an operations center is optimized with its own AI, it is able to sift through mountains of data provided by individual AI-enabled devices to see, detect, and respond to anomalies and threats across the entire distributed SD-WAN deployment, refine local AI instances, and ensure a consistent, self-healing WAN experience across even the largest and most complex SD-WAN environments.

Take a security-driven approach to networking to improve user experience and simplify operations at the WAN edge with Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution.