With the constant rise of modern cyber threats, many businesses are aiming for zero-trust infrastructure to keep themselves and their customers safe. But a zero-trust environment, where only authorized people can access information and resources, is often more difficult to implement than anticipated. If security teams and network engineers cannot visualize the network and its possible traffic paths and behaviors, they can’t possibly secure the environment.

On June 28, we announced new features within Forward Enterprise that help security engineers spend less time on reactive tasks so they can be more proactive. Why would a networking company expand into the security space? Good question. Let me share some of the reasoning that led to expanding deeper into this space, and why I am excited about it.

Today’s networks are too complex for manual network management and updates. With most enterprises composed of tens of thousands of devices spanning multiple geographical locations, on-premises hardware, Virtual environment, and multiple clouds – it’s virtually impossible to push updates manually. Also – the sheer volume of vendors and coding languages can be overwhelming for a network operations engineer.

Network operations teams rely on highly specialized tools developed by individual vendors designed to address particular problems. The result? Most enterprises have 10+ Network Operations applications in place and they don’t talk to each other—which means that network operations engineers spend an exhaustive and unnecessary amount of time toggling between applications and sifting through information as they work to resolve tickets.

Did you hear about the change window that went exactly as planned? No? That’s because the odds of winning the PowerBall without buying a ticket are better than the odds of executing a change window on a global network without a glitch. What about the story of the tier one network engineer that diagnosed and resolved an ACL in seconds? That one also seems as mythical as staying friends with your ex—but it’s not.

In network operations, it’s never the same day twice. Most network engineers love this aspect, but it has a dark side. The best plans often fall to the wayside—in an instant work stops and firefighting begins. In the last year, I’ve been part of a whole-day colo move, diagnosed an outage in the middle of the night, and resolved a slow performance issue. I know what the networking operations experience is like, and I know how much better it can be.

Network security is a top-of-mind concern for business executives and technical leaders alike. The costs of a major breach can range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and it can take years for companies’ reputations to recover. But when most people think about network security, network modeling, visualization, and path analysis probably don’t spring to mind. We believe it should.

Speak with networking ops and engineering leads anywhere, and you’ll hear what I frequently hear: “The way my team actually spends their time is the opposite of how they feel they could best spend it.” The passion they have for their team and the network they keep running is clearly at odds with a frustrating feeling that they can’t get ahead.