Humanising the network

Not too long ago, social media were anathema to business managers. Their use by staff members in business hours was considered time-wasting and frivolous. There was also no benefit for their organisations in the communication tools offered by such Web sites as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, they said.

The network is able to use social media to contact the administrator in the event of any out-of-the-ordinary occurrence.

Andy Robb is CTO at Duxbury Networking.

However, their attitudes are changing rapidly as the business advantages of collaboration and idea-sharing are becoming more obvious. Social networks are now beginning to replace intranets and even e-mail conversation channels, as their popularity and cost-effectiveness gain ground in the corporate corridors of power.

Today, almost one billion people use social media. The exponential growth of mobile devices on a global scale - such as smartphones and PC tablets, together with new-generation software applications to complement them - have broadened the scope of social media almost beyond what was considered possible only a few years ago.

For example, applications that allow users to post a single message simultaneously to more than one individual - and to multiple social network sites - are popular, and good use is being made of their advantages in business-to-business, business-to-customers, and other sales and marketing roles by early adopters of the technology.

Up to now, these conversations have been limited to the human interface, but groundbreaking developments in the IT industry have made it possible to use a social media interface that invites and connects humans to machines, machines to humans and machines to machines.

Unlike the fully automated messages associated with machine-to-machine and machine-to-human communications of the past, now machines are able to communicate with humans in the language common to social media users.

What are the business benefits? For the network administrator, for example, the advantages are numerous. He can 'friend' his network and 'tweet' certain machines in the corporate infrastructure - and have them tweet back in response.

He is able to 'follow' and 'chat' with Internet Protocol-based machines on the network, such as switches, routers, controllers, access points, phones and cameras. This allows the network to be monitored and parameters changed, if necessary, in real-time from anywhere in the world.

Equally, the network is able to use social media to contact the administrator in the event of any out-of-the-ordinary occurrence, such as a security breach.

Unlike fully automated alerts, contextual discussions that require human language skills and interactions are now facilitated, opening the door to a wide range of communication options.

For instance, rather than having to drive to the office to interrogate or configure a network switch, the network administrator is now able to tweet the switch from anywhere and interact with it - converse with it - using any one of a number of mobile devices.

With increasing emphasis on real-time communication and 'presence management', software applications are able to immediately tweet about certain errors that are occurring. Vendor engineers, following these tweets, might realise that a problem is 'trending' and take proactive, remedial action by tweeting back 'fixes' before any problems are overtly manifest.

Significantly, engineers are able to tweet in their home language and Twitter will convert it to whatever language is used by the relevant network infrastructure.

This allows multi-linguistic conversations giving engineers or administrators the opportunity to address a network infrastructure in any country and communicate using their language of choice. These developments are seen by many industry watchers as an important step towards integrating employees into their working environments.

According to independent industry analyst and researcher Krishnan Subramanian, whether people like it or not, social networking and mobile communications technologies have become part of daily life. “In this changed scenario, any smart infrastructure should let its users tap these tools as a part of their daily work. I think that over a period of time, as these technologies mature to meet the stringent needs of enterprise customers, they will become all pervasive,” he says.

Business coach and writer Stephen Hultquist says social media-based real-time alerts, issue resolution and network management communications, within a context clearly understood by network engineers, “is an important advancement that should be on every CIO's and network manager's radar”.

Where will this technology lead people? With the 'humanisation' of the network, there can be seen the birth of a new, universally-understood language that will - according to Rohit Mehra, a director of research group IDC - release network managers from data centre captivity and set them free in the cloud.