Designing Resilient Networks That Refuse to Fail
The networks we rely on today face constant stress from demands that weren’t even on the horizon when these networks were designed several years (or decades) ago. From traffic spikes and distributed workloads to malicious threats and AI-driven demands, large-scale network infrastructure must now be ready to adapt, scale, and respond to unpredictability in real-time.
Network assurance—making sure your network performs as intended in any condition—once meant ensuring uptime. In today’s world, the connections that power business operations depend on how well networks are designed not only for uptime but also for resilience, scalability, and security as demands continue to change.
The New Definition of Network Assurance
It’s time to think of network assurance as your competitive currency. With it, you can ensure reliable business performance, maintain customer trust, and accelerate innovation. Without assured network performance, you risk revenue loss, reputational damage, and service interruption.
Network assurance can no longer be separated from security or resilience, especially in distributed environments where resources, applications, workloads, and users are distributed globally across the enterprise, Cloud, and distributed across on-premises and hosted environments.
What defines network assurance in a connected world? Uptime plus much more:
- Protection against cyber threats, outages, and misconfigurations that can disrupt operations and expose sensitive data.
- Predictable service delivery so teams can anticipate changes, maintain consistency, and meet expectations.
- Data integrity to make sure sensitive information remains unaltered and can be trusted to deliver business outcomes.
- Redundancy at every layer, allowing for instant failover and uninterrupted service even when some parts of the network go offline.
- High performance across distributed and dynamic workloads, with the ability to scale to support demands without latency or degradation.
- Overall Equipment Effectiveness or OEE = Availability X Performance X Quality. A Performance Assured Network helps deliver “world class” OEE that is 85% or better by minimizing downtime losses, reducing micro-stoppages and delays, and losses due to defects, scrap, rejects, and rework.
7 Pillars of Network Assurance
Network assurance doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built by bringing the best-practice network architectures and business operational practices together.
1. Network topology
As enterprise IT environments become more distributed, traditional three-tiered network designs (Core, Distribution, and Access) will no longer be sufficient.
Traditional and out-of-date network architectures assume stable, predictable traffic patterns. Today’s modern data-driven businesses are driven by the constant change of bursty user and network traffic, shifting workloads, and the rise of bandwidth-intensive applications.
To support this shift, many organizations are adopting topologies like fiber-based mesh networks. By connecting devices and nodes in multiple paths, mesh designs allow for intelligent, efficient routing and ensure continuous connectivity despite disruptions or unexpected traffic spikes. To further strengthen network performance, these types of Ethernet fabrics can leverage Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) or Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL). These protocols enable all available links to be active simultaneously with multiple, equal-cost paths, so traffic can be rerouted quickly around failures and congestion (more about this in a bit). With advanced networking foundations in place, organizations can move toward software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).
