Top 5 Trends: Network Automation and Security in 2024

2023 turned out to be another interesting year for Network and Security teams. With the worrying geo-political situation affecting supplies and costs, and network complexity rising, organizations struggled to keep control of their IT architectures. Two important concerns continued to rise. Poor visibility over IT network activity has made them increasingly difficult to manage, and cybercriminals are launching more increasingly-sophisticated attacks, often exploiting DNS. So to take back control over network operations in 2024, observability, network automation and DNS Threat Intelligence have become top-of-mind, aided by APIs, AIOps, and smart DDI (DNS-DHCP-IPAM).

As we head into 2024, here are Top 5 emerging trends we forecast will intensify in 2024 concerning network automation, security, and observability:

1. Important shift to proactive network protection leveraging Threat Intelligence data insights

Current Situation
With cyberattacks increasing in frequency and sophistication, security teams are faced with data overload. They are required to sift through huge volumes of security logs to distinguish real threats from false alerts. Taking a reactive stance to threats is now no longer acceptable.

What’s Required
To prevent breach fatigue, SOCs need easier detection of threats, simpler investigation, and faster remediation. High quality Threat Intelligence and filtering via quality feeds are therefore fundamental. Actionable insights gained from real-time analysis are needed to allow real threats to be more easily distinguished. 

How DDI Helps
DNS is ideally placed to provide data on network events, so is essential to the global security strategy of any organization. Combining actionable DNS analytics with DNS threat intelligence feeds creates an effective DNS-centric threat intelligence solution, valuable for proactively defending against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The new IDC DNS Threat Report confirms that over 75% of organizations consider threat intelligence based on actionable DNS data brings better ransomware protection, better malware protection, and improved phishing detection. 

2. Modernization of Network Observability for optimizing operations, performance, and compliance

Current Situation
Increased infrastructure complexity and tool sprawl have reduced the control IT staff have over their networks, leading to operational and performance challenges. Effective management, operation, and protection of networks to ensure business resilience has therefore become very difficult.  

What’s Required
To understand where and why network issues are occurring, your NOC teams need comprehensive visibility into network activity. Real-time monitoring of infrastructure components and traffic is required to overcome network operational inefficiencies and reduce risks of outages. DNS-DHCP-IPAM (DDI) is central to the infrastructure, hence a valuable source of information.

How DDI Helps
A modern DDI Observability solution provides single-viewpoint visibility over your DDI infrastructure and related DNS traffic. Your networking and SOC teams gain valuable insights into network health, performance and resource utilization. DDI Observability helps detect anomalies easier and simplifies troubleshooting in order to optimize network operations and performance, strengthen business resilience, and improve UX.

3. Increasing dependence on Network Source of Truth (NSoT) for Network Automation 

Current Situation
The uncertain economic outlook has augmented the need for IT staff to achieve IT cost savings and improve efficiency. At the same time they have to support architecture modernization and handle multi-cloud. Network automation has become a top priority but is challenging to move forward. IDC’s 2023 Global Network Automation survey found the main technical inhibitors to be tool integration, legacy systems, and lack of trusted network data repositories.

What’s Required
Without a Network Source of Truth (NSoT), network data remains siloed and fragmented across the organization. This hinders organizations from managing the lifecycle of network objects and devices easily and efficiently. It also affects sharing of accurate information across networking and security ecosystem components.

How DDI Helps
A smart DDI solution with built-in NSoT and open APIs is a key success factor to Network Automation. Ideally the DDI should perform dynamic discovery across environments to feed the NSoT. It serves as a true Network Automation Hub that pulls and pushes actionable data through automated workflows. More than 80% of enterprises acknowledge the importance of Network Source of Truth in their automation strategy. Benefits seen include faster service deployments, reduced operating costs, and improved network capacity planning.

4. Improved quality of open APIs to enhance agility of IT and NetOps teams 

Current Situation
APIs have become essential and hence widely adopted. They deliver data back and forth to interconnect the entire IT infrastructure, devices, and applications ecosystem, orchestrate business workflows, streamline IT processes, and manage end-to-end lifecycle of network objects. Everywhere you look, you’ll find an API enabling network automation to make your IT, NetOps, and DevOps teams more agile, innovative, and efficient. But concerns still remain around their quality and management, where sheer volume of APIs results in technical debt and zombie APIs.

What’s Required
APIs have the potential to bring operational efficiency and ultimately cost savings, especially as they enable network automation. But achieving that potential requires them to meet key criteria, in particular high performance, security, the ability to handle network complexity, and reasonable licensing costs.

How DDI Helps
DDI APIs play a central role in network automation and security, leveraging valuable DNS, DHCP and IPAM data and metadata. This allows IT staff to reap tangible benefits very quickly. By putting DDI at the center of their network automation strategy and leveraging DDI APIs, networking teams can optimize and accelerate their daily operational activities. Example use cases include lifecycle management of network objects from provisioning to decommissioning, (including compute and VM deployment automation), policy enforcement, DNS security alerting, and discovery of devices connected to SD-WAN infrastructure such as Cisco Meraki. A recent EMA report showed that 44% already integrate DDI with network security tools, and 41% with ITSM systems like ServiceNow.

5. Fast-growing number of AI use cases for AIOps and cybersecurity

Current Situation
For effective network operations and security, in particular for detection and correction of anomalies, data-driven decisions are now compulsory. 2023 saw continued progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) applications, with a focus on improved algorithms, automation, and integration of AI into various industries and services. These led to a wide range of innovative applications, such as early detection of diseases for healthcare, and real-time detection of fraudulent activities in the finance sector. As well as the obvious AIOps use cases, the one usage common AI across all industries is for enhancing cybersecurity.

What’s Required
For their NetOps, organizations struggle to manage the growing number of alerts across monitoring tools. Leveraging AIOps to more accurately identify and prioritize issues and alerts can bring organizations significant savings in time and human capital. Anomaly detection using ML models highlights unusual patterns in network traffic, helping identify misconfigurations as well as detect and prevent cyber threats.

How DDI Helps
DDI solutions are able to harness the power of AI to streamline network operations and fortify DNS security via intelligent threat detection, predictive analysis, and automated response and mitigation. AI-powered algorithms can analyze DNS traffic and accurately detect anomalies or potential cyberthreats such as phishing or DGAs. By continuously monitoring DNS activity and establishing baseline behavior, suspicious patterns such as DNS tunneling or data exfiltration attempts can be quickly identified. Automated response capability then ensures swift and effective mitigation of DNS-based attacks, reducing the impact on network infrastructure and enhancing the overall security posture.

2024 promises to be a rich year for IT innovation. To learn more about how EfficientIP’s SOLIDserver DDI can help you better control your IT infrastructure, feel free to contact one of our Network Automation and Security experts.