Zigor Gaubeca participates in Aslan Hybrid with the workshop: "Self-driving networks: the future of networks"

June 9, 2021 - On June 2, Grupo Aire's CTO, Zigor Gaubeca, participated in the 28th edition of Aslan's annual congress,  Aslan Hybrid: Digitization is future , in a workshop in which he spoke about self-managed and self-configured networks, which for Grupo Aire it is the future of networks. The workshop began with a brief introduction about Aire Networks , a wholesale operator, which occupies the fourth position in Spain. It has its own network, designed and deployed by the company itself. “We are very customer-centric, committed to safety and we have a very technological vision,” explained Gaubeca. In addition, the CTO of Grupo Aire explained that in the last 2-3 years the company has had a very rapid growth, of 85%, with the acquisition of companies , becoming a group. The global turnover objective of this is to reach more than 200 million euros by 2023. "We are on the way, making a very high investment in research." On the other hand, Gaubeca explained that the result of this growth is a human capital of almost 400 employees after the last acquisition ; with six work centers in Spain and one in Lisbon; and more than 7,000 direct clients and many indirect clients behind, given the group's wholesale nature. To close the introduction about Aire Networks and Grupo Aire, he spoke about the network deployed by the company in Spain, which has 27,000 kilometers and has a growth capacity of N * 400 Gbps . The network is high capacity NG-DWDM (the latest in optical transport).
"Our autonomous system is in the Top 100 for IPv4 (among the best connected worldwide)."
What are self-driving networks?
After this introduction, Gaubeca went on to talk about self-driving networks, which are based on the concept of the self-guided vehicle . The idea is to design networks that can be managed by themselves with the help of  machine learning and artificial intelligence. These networks should by themselves discover new elements in the network, organize and discover themselves, as well as monitor themselves, automatically detect new clients, configure services and automatically diagnose failures using  machine learning technology . Grupo Aire's CTO explained that the group is already in the network automation phase , implementing non-traditional network event display systems. In this aspect, he explained, the analytics part is very important not only for monitoring, but also for cybersecurity, in order to apply rules. “However, both Grupo Aire and the sector in general should be at a much more advanced and automated point. Ideally, the networks would manage themselves, ”said Gaubeca. What technologies do we need to reach self-managed networks? Gaubeca developed five key points:
  • Telemetry: it is about receiving information in real time that feeds the decision-making systems. More and more manufacturers are supporting this type of system monitoring.
  • Multidimensional vision: not only seeing a problem, but where else there may be it, analyzing different equipment and devices and making decisions. The correlation of events and data from different sources is key for making the most accurate decisions possible, whether focused on the provision or operation of the network itself.
  • Automation: it is key. The current methods are based on the standard services that are implemented in modern operating systems. To be able to automate it is very important to have a pseudo language to be able to abstract from the systems.
  • Get to a natural language of telling the system what we want to do (declarative intent) . It is something for the future, but we are working on it
  • Decision making: based on rules or a defined workflow , systems that can be trained to make smarter decisions. With machine learning it is possible to prepare systems based on experience and allow much more complex decision making than in rule-based systems.
Finally, the CTO of Grupo Aire spoke about the future challenges facing the group , among which is the advanced visualization of network events, including those related to cybersecurity; the semi-automatic performance of analysis and prediction models of attacks and traffic typologies; continue automating network provisioning processes; have recommendations in the NOC based on prediction and learning systems; be able to make simple autonomous decisions; Free Engineering and Support staff from routine work to be able to dedicate efforts to other tasks that generate value and have a quick response to network and security incidents. You can see the full presentation here .
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