network, business rules and network best practices. This type of automation can expose information about the network to other applications, groups and people as well as reduce the need for human touch. Recognizing our industry will continue to move forward, we need to be ready, or we may find ourselves showing up to a drone race in a station wagon.

The driver’s seat

Where and how we work is changing. The day is coming where large buildings housing network operation centers (NOCs) made up of tons of screens, swivel chair workflows, and shift after shift of highly trained technicians and engineers will be a thing of a past, replaced by a personalized UX to remote employees. The pandemic has only accelerated this shift toward a work-from-anywhere model. As a result, this will have a profound impact on IT and security—in fact, it already has.

A true multiplatform solution is a natural extension to support this shift. It’s Any Time, Any Where, Any Device (ATAWAD) to get people the information they need regardless of what device they prefer. Internet traffic and consumer software has evolved, naturally, toward mobile due to the ease of use, distribution, and connectivity. This becomes powerful with notifications and being able to keep key metrics and service level objectives top of mind. The result is establishing an ‘only what you want, when you want it, the way you want it, anywhere you want it’ environment.

Figure 4: Building to the cloud

The road ahead

Current trajectory and approaches are not bringing the desired results as today’s network management software is slow, error-prone and requires continued specialized training. This puts the burden of this evolution on the people and teams rather than on the software and technology. Even when you have the right people and software, the critical information is often buried among meaningless alarms, backlogs of data and only available to that limited audience of specially trained individuals. These challenges once more place the burden of communication and status on the individual when it’s something that technology can and should be able to easily handle.

We need to evolve to self-driving and beyond to scale faster. In the leap from one mode of transportation to the next, we feel the growing pains of the unknown. Realizing that our most valuable asset is our people, this continued push towards CDX and understanding the value of concepts like personalization, autonomous networking and ATAWAD will help us navigate the road ahead. We already know it will include network transformation toward open and disaggregated networks. To make certain we are ready to drive in this future, we must start to prepare now, or we won’t be ready to take full advantage of what this new technology can provide. This is the new world of UX in network management.