These are the five ways AIOps could transform retail networking

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Today, as artificial intelligence (AI) innovations take centre stage, there are parallel discussions on how AI for IT Operations (AIOps) is poised to transform various aspects of our technological landscape. As per a recent report of NASSCOM, in India, over 50% of businesses have initiated the integration of AI into their workflow, with either full implementation or the initial stages underway. Consequently, AIOps will play a crucial role in the ongoing digital transformation of enterprises. The next thing that should be on the business radar is AI Networking, which will be relevant for wireless, wired, and wide area networks (WAN). 

In the retail industry, the current AI investments stand at US$5 billion and are projected to surge to US$31 billion by 2028, as per EY’s report. Before exploring the new facet of AI innovation, let’s take a step back. It is imperative to understand the key characteristics of an effective AI solution and provide clarity around how AI, machine learning (ML), and automation can help retail organisations.

What AIOps can do for the IT team  

AIOps, a term coined by Gartner, is a solution that uses big data and ML to automate IT operations processes such as anomaly detection and causality determination. It’s like DevOps in that it consolidates service and performance management, teaming this with automation to deliver continuous insights that enable improvement.

So, where do networking, storage, and support services fit into the equation? Gartner clarified these roles in a new term — AI Networking. A subset of AIOps, AI Networking is considered a more efficient way to manage Day 2 network operations — the phase after design and implementation, when the team is analysing and optimising the modern networking system. 

On the other hand, AI Networking sits within the broader infrastructure but is specific to work around wired, wireless, and WAN networks. AIOps and, more specifically, AI Networking provide intelligent automation, for faster response to connectivity issues, or even prevent network outages. Given the sheer volume of cloud-based services, digital users, and IoT devices across the various locations the retail network supports, it enables them to handle these tasks much more rapidly than humanly achievable.

Use cases for AI Networking 

Intelligent AI-powered solutions are already helping IT pros solve today’s biggest retail networking challenges in the following ways: 

• Remote management of multiple stores: Today, it’s standard to see centralised IT teams managing dispersed locations. With this in mind, AI Networking features provide near-real-time visibility into network activity wherever it is taking place. This includes determining which devices are being connected to networks, identifying sites that are struggling with LAN or WAN issues, and collecting essential data logs automatically.
• Accurate identification of issues: In the same way that ML models are designed to point out patterns of behaviour and deviations from them, AI Networking insights and alerts help uncover wireless, wired, and WAN gateway issues that traditional tools miss. For instance, AI Networking can help you see the difference between a device that’s misbehaving due to a hardware failure or something intermittent that a firmware upgrade can fix.

• Improvement of user journeys: Modern customers not only expect products that meet their needs; they also demand high-quality in-store experiences. Subsequently, IT departments need to find ways to deliver exceptional guest and employee access, in an environment where technical expertise is often sparse and on-site troubleshooting can be difficult. The most advanced AI Networking features address this challenge by recommending how one can boost network performance, without costly upgrades, while delivering on operational expectations and customer experiences at the same time.

Why to choose AI-powered solutions?

Although every AIOps solution enables you to automate efficiencies to an extent, some solutions offer significantly more capabilities than others. The most innovative options cover Day 0 and Day 1 tasks as well as Day 2 responsibilities. One should keep these attributes in mind while finding a solution that will comprehensively address their retail networking needs:

1. 1. Intuitiveness and effectiveness: Aside from including a streamlined dashboard, other characteristics of an innovative AIOps solution include built-in natural language search to help with basic Day 0 activities such as configuring a service set identifier (SSID) or setting up a guest network. For advanced needs, the best solutions allow you to tap into capabilities like automatically baselining the performance and behaviour of each of their locations without any manual configuration of service level expectations. 

1. 2. Ability to detect behavioural anomalies: Behavioural change is a clear sign of an impending device failure or security breach. Therefore, one should seek an AI Networking solution where the AI and ML are trained with data from thousands of deployments and millions of devices and endpoints, along with clustering technology to differentiate each location by size, number of network devices used, and how many clients connect daily. In bringing together external data with the internal information your locations generate, an advanced AI Network tool offers accurate insights for sorting out behavioural anomalies.

1. 3. Actionable-insights generation: AI Networking should go beyond basic number crunching and churning out lists of issues to resolve or opportunities to optimise. The most advanced AIOps solutions present their findings as actionable recommendations. Such suggestions could range from changing the settings for a location’s Wi-Fi access points (APs) to reduce power consumption to replacing a cable between a specific AP and switch to eliminate the source of intermittent wireless issues. 

1. 4. Full-stack Zero Trust approach: The best solutions use AIOps and AI Networking methods across their entire network to maximise efficiency, and this includes enhancing security. AI-powered Zero Trust features offer accurate client information and visibility into which applications are being accessed by IoT and guest devices, and whether devices are displaying behavioural changes. For example, if a stationary point-of-sale (POS) device appears to be displaying roaming behaviour — or starts communicating with unknown resources — a best-in-class AI Networking solution will be able to flag this as a behavioural anomaly so that one can rapidly pinpoint the source of an issue.

1. 5. AI built into the network architecture: Alongside a full-stack approach, the savviest AI solutions come from networking vendors that integrate AI Networking into their overall architecture — from network devices to management platforms. In this way, the vendor is reducing acquisition and maintenance costs, minimising manual configuration tasks, and decreasing the time it takes to develop competency across your organisation. As a rule of thumb, tightly integrated solutions are more likely to give you higher-value insights at no extra cost.

When any retail organisation is deciding on a suitable networking solution, it should explore how AI plays a role in it. Today, always-on networks are a competitive advantage in the retail landscape, so they must consider how AIOps can provide them with actionable insights, help automate tasks to free up IT resources for higher-value projects, and provide the ability to improve business and competitive outcomes overall.

—The author, Prakash Krishnamoorthy, is Director – India at HPE Aruba Networking, the security and networking subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. The views expressed are personal

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