Intent-Based Networking What is this Intent-Based Networking ? As per Cisco – Intent-Based Networking is to align business goals to network results It highlights two factor – “Business Goals” and “Network” In today’s world, digitalization is prevailing and spreading with rapid pace. According to one research, 89% of the companies have started adopting this culture. When we talk about the business goals, we cannot separate IT from it. Here, the key factor is not adoption, but the speed of adoption of Digitalization with context to business goals. To keep up with the pace is the key to exist in the market. Many organizations is disappeared from the market which were slow or resisting to the change. Innovation is the main component to decide which initiative to focus in order to be in the market and as well as do hamper the business goals. It must have tight partnership of IT and Business. However, the challenge is the resource allocation for such innovation. The new technologies like IoT, Cloud Computing, Mobility and Machine Learning (ML) is scaling new heights for the business and also increasing the productivity of employees. Another aspect is that it is not a point of work for the situation rather it is an ongoing process. The faster you adapt, more the chances to be in the market. One such research says that, 35% of the network downtime are due to the human errors. The main cause of this figure is that Traditional approach as they are manually intensive and slow for the result. One another such data is that only 7% cases have downtime due to security breach. So lack of innovation and intent lead us an engineer to do troubleshooting rather focusing on the innovation. How does an Intent-Based Networking works? IBNS – Intent-Based Network System have some characteristics which can help a network engineer to innovate and apply along with monitoring of network. 1. Ability to translate the network command into software action with an intent considering the business or IT goals which are termed as Policies. 2. Once these policies are defined, they are implemented across the network infrastructure by using the automation i.e. network automation. 3. With this, gathering of data through monitoring of network is also done by Intent-Based Networking. 4. Analysis of gathered data, through ML, it can check whether the desired business outcome has achieved of not. What you will achieve it through Intent-Based Networking? As discussed earlier, the very basics of every organization is to change as per the time. The resistance to change will adversely affect the business goals and thus proves inability to pace with the market condition. Through Intent-Based Networking, the primary benefit is response: Many a times the response time taken to change in IT process is 4 months, which is very slow. So, IBN will provide the speed and agility to respond to the changes through various data analysis by ML. This leads to improvise the time taken for the troubleshooting as it involves less manual interference. Thus, engineer can now focus on innovation or optimization of the process. The main factor of which the current IT infrastructure is suffering is how to tackle the security of the network. Through IBN, the threat detection rate will increase, with policies the compliance will also be adhered. The continuous network monitoring, analysis will decrease the downtime and this all will happen through automation with minimum manual input. The last and foremost thing is, we can achieve the business goals rapidly through IT process changes and innovation.