Assuring Excellent User Experiences with AI-Driven
SD-WAN
Partner Update

Also check out Nexum’s partner update: Juniper Mist Takes On SD-WAN written by Allyn Crowe, Senior Security Engineer.

Over the past few years, it goes without saying that the world has experienced a great deal of ups and downs. Companies have had to adapt to remote work environments, hybrid work environments and everything in between. Through it all, one thing has proven its importance – the need to provide an excellent user experience no matter where the workforce is located.

At the same time, IT teams have never been busier. The combination of new technologies, a reliance on cloud services and new models of working mean there is more to do and less time to do it. Recent research from analyst firm ESG supports this, stating that some 91% of IT professionals believe their organization needs to move faster than just three years ago.

Companies need to streamline operations and make them more efficient across the organization. At Juniper Networks, we’ve put an emphasis on giving organizations the tools they need to ensure the user experience is excellent, every time. Because at the end of the day, users remember that their video call was dropped or that their work on a presentation was interrupted – not that their network operated as intended most of the time.

Juniper Mist WAN Assurance, part of the AI-driven SD-WAN solution with Session Smart Routing, was developed to meet these needs. It delivers simpler operations, shorter mean time to repair (MTTR) and, most importantly, better visibility into end-user experiences.

How does AI-Driven SD-WAN work?

It works like this: rich, session-level telemetry is collected from Juniper Session Smart Routers and then that telemetry is fed into the Mist AI engine. Mist AI then monitors and enforces service-level expectations (SLEs) using key metrics, such as memory consumption, ISP network availability, application response times and packet loss to measure gateway, WAN link and application health. As a result, the solution delivers accurate, real-time insights into end-user experiences, helping IT teams identify root causes of any service issues or degradation before users have a chance to report them.

What can AI-Driven SD-WAN do?

Say there’s a bad cable connection somewhere within the network. Previously, teams would spend enormous amounts of time working through a checklist of possible problems before checking cables. With Juniper Mist WAN Assurance, teams are notified of a bad cable before time is wasted elsewhere.

WAN Assurance can also help when there are certain users experiencing lag time or dropped connections. An IT team would normally need to manually check each user device, investigate each wireless and hardwired connection and even walk around the office area trying to narrow down the location where the loss was occurring. With the visibility and automated identification that WAN Assurance gives, teams are directed to the problem immediately, allowing them to repair the user experience sooner and use their valuable time for tasks more important to the organization.

In addition, the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant (VNA) allows IT teams to quickly get the answers they need using natural language and provides recommendations to help them better understand and solve a problem. Just ask Marvis, “What’s wrong with Bob’s video call?” and receive insights into the root cause.

With this knowledge, MSPs and IT professionals can quickly and easily pinpoint potential network problems before the user experience is ever impacted. Because of the combination of automation and insight, the number of tickets an organization has to deal with and the mean time to repair is reduced. There simply is no longer a need to search for a needle in a haystack of needles. The AI-based Juniper Mist WAN Assurance solution takes care of it so teams can use their cycles on work that more positively affects the company’s bottom line.

By combining Mist AI and with the granular, session-level data from Session Smart Routers, Juniper AI-driven SD-WAN provides industry-leading automation and insight for the best user, device and application experiences in branch and remote locations. It truly is the industry’s most advanced AIOps solution for SD-WAN.

Original post here.