As cloud technology evolves, businesses must evolve with it and finding a way to harness and support these new innovations begins with an investment in Software Defined Networking.
With a rapidly growing market that expected to reach $35billion by 2018, it’s clear that Software Defined Networking (SDN) is set to have a large impact on the future of data networking – but what exactly is it and why is it growing so quickly?
What is SDN?
Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology is a system of networking that enables administrators to gain much greater insight and control over their business network and provides the necessary flexibility, scalability and support for modern, virtualised infrastructures that are heavily invested in the cloud.
With traditional networks, a business would typically transfer data by using a group of separate devices with integrated control and data-forwarding planes that each needed to be manually configured and managed independently from one another. As a result, the process of updating the traditional network is incredibly slow and disruptive to the business as even the slightest of tweaks could potentially take weeks to finish.
However, with SDN, businesses can save a great deal of time and money with a solution that centralises the control of the network and gives administrators a clear overview of the network as a whole, enabling them to dictate to the underlying systems how the forwarding plane should handle networking traffic.
By using southbound APIs, SDN can relay information to the switches and routers below, while northbound APIs communicate with cloud applications above, enabling network administrators to easily shape traffic and deploy services freely.
Why is SDN now necessary?
Although traditional networking may have been a suitable solution in the days when network changes could be made independently from business changes, digital transformation (DX) and the rocketing growth of cloud computing and mobility in the workplace has put a much greater strain on business networks and traditional methods are no longer capable of meeting these new demands. We’re now seeing more voice and video traffic on networks than ever before, SDN offers the security and prioritisation for these real-time applications meaning businesses can continue to adopt new technologies with minimal risk.
For all the benefits cloud computing brings to businesses, unless the foundations it’s built on are solid, the whole tower will eventually crumble. Instead, modern businesses now require a network that is fast, flexible and capable of supporting a whole infrastructure of hosted services and applications that would fail to run on a network designed to handle little more than calls and connectivity.
Moreover, managing and controlling an infrastructure of hosted cloud appliances on a substandard traditional network is going to be a huge amount of work - and the thought of attempting it without being given huge amounts of time and capital to invest is enough to drive fear into the heart of any IT Administrator.
SDN & Digital Transformation
Over the last decade, we’ve seen a phenomenal growth in the cloud computing market which is, according to a report by Forbes, projected to increase from $67B in 2015 to $162B in 2020 at a CAGR of 19%.
