Impact of Emerging Network Technologies

A multi-cloud networking (MCN) is one that uses more than one cloud services or data centres which could be a combination of public and private to service an application or an enterprise. By using more than one cloud, the enterprise benefits from the specialism or strengths of the cloud vendors. For example, Microsoft can offer OpenAI’s large language model services and Amazon can offer low latency due to its multiple locations around the world. The enterprise can enjoy greater flexibility and scalability and select the most cost-effective package from each vendor. MCN can offer redundancy and better resilience should the services of one vendor get disrupted. Further benefits are no lock-ins to a specific vendor so the data belongs to the enterprise and not the vendor; greater competition in the cloud market means greater innovation which is good for customers in terms of cost and speed. The disadvantages are: the administrator has to learn about different policies, processes and security protocols of different vendors and it takes time to track multiple bills. That said, there are companies that offer an intermediary service to streamline handling multiple cloud accounts by using a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN). Traditionally, an enterprise would use a private direct connect cloud service for each vendor. With SD-WAN acting as an intermediary and orchestrating the network traffic to the desired vendor for different data, the enterprise is outsourcing the network infrastructure aspect, improving interoperability and efficiency as there is no need to reconfigure networking and security for each vendor, promoting 99.999% uptime.

Intent-based networking (IBN) is one that relies on AI and machine learning to analyse the intent of the network administrator and configure the network and provision users automatically. This improves scalability at speed and drives down overheads. With IBN, the configuration of access controls is automated and the network administrators can review and make tweaks as necessary. The network administrators can thus use this tool to better manage workload of large networks and focus on other tasks such as instant response to outliers. The benefits are: (a) network administrators can use IBN as a co-pilot to improve efficiency and reduce human error; (b) AI is aware of and is able to navigate the complex network without having to remember all the access controls or creating duplicates, enhancing security; and (c) fast troubleshooting before an error occurs. The limitations are: (a) feeding data to a IBN model is a continuous process that needs constant training and monitoring to fine tune; (b) AI requires a lot of compute power and thus is not environmentally friendly; and (c) there is a risk of losing control of the network to AI.

Wi-Fi 7 is the next generation of Wi-Fi, introduced in 2024, which aims to be faster than Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), introduced in 2021. The benefits are: (a) the speed improvement reaches 46Gbps which massively overtakes the Wi-Fi 6E 9.6Gbps. It does this by tapping both 6GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi bands so if one band is congested or not in range of a smart device, data can still be transmitted. If both bands are available, more data can flow through; (b) a Wi-Fi 7 router accommodates the increasing number of smart devices to stream data as it supports 16 x 16 multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO), while a Wi-Fi 6E router supports 8 x 8, i.e. 16 antennas versus eight antennas supporting 16 and eight devices respectively, reducing the queue; and (c) It also is not affected by interference and is able to switch bands when the network gets congested without losing connection. The limitations are; (a) while the technology is there, in practice, a router may not offer the maximum capacity due to the cost of having more antennas; and (b) Wi-Fi 7 requires smart devices to be Wi-Fi 7 enabled so older devices would limit the router’s potential and default to queuing for its turn, resulting in a lag. This is because Wi-Fi 7 uses a carrier wave called Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), to put in more transit data and overcomes interference, and OFDMA is not backward-compatible. Wi-Fi 6 uses OFDMA but is subject to the effects of interference.