For a long time networking management was made manually and, as a consequence, slowly. This traditional hardware-based and time-consuming approach is no longer valid in today’s fast-moving business environment.
Over the last couple of years, networking began to modernize and the fundamental shift lay in moving networking tasks from hardware to software.
A programmable network makes easier and faster to run activities like bandwidth allocation, traffic routing and security policy configuration, and anomaly detection. It allows to save time in network management, to make troubleshooting and remediating activities in real time as well as eliminates human error.
Cisco’s approach to networking programmability and automation is known as intent-based networking and enlists the management console Digital Network Architecture (DNA) Center. Devices can be automatically configured via the centralized management console and security policies are set at a granular level.
Intent-based networking enables not only granular control of security policies but also far better management of applications. Bandwidth-heavy applications, in particular, can suffer from performance problems without rigorous network management.
That’s why Italtel, a Cisco gold partner in several countries and integrator, built Netwrapper, an application to manage network services, on top of intent-based networking. Netwrapper can manage bandwidth and set networking security policy for various applications and services. Videoconferencing applications, for example, might 
suffer from poor quality at certain times of day. With Netwrapper, customers can automatically configure network policies to prioritize network bandwidth to the applications that need it most.
“Now, we can understand the network behavior and change the network to adapt to the bandwidth available, providing priority to these services, and less priority to other services,” said Camillo Ascione, strategic alliance manager and chief technology officer at Italtel. “We are able, thanks to the programmability of the network, to adapt dynamically the networking in response to the quality of the video services running on the network”.
Read more about Cisco’s approach to network programmability and relevant market trends in this article by Lauren Horwitz
