Enterprise network demands have exploded in recent years as more organizations adopt cloud computing and bring-your-own-device plans. In addition, companies remain on the lookout for any opportunity to improve their internal communications – most notably, through videoconferencing tools. The cumulative effect of these investments will be greater strain placed on already taxed networks, affecting the performance of numerous enterprise applications and services.
Network demands will only increase in the coming years, placing more emphasis on the need for solutions that can alleviate bottlenecks and other performance-related issues. More businesses have invested in software defined networking tools to improve their ability to tackle these challenges and ensure that network resources are available whenever needed. According to InformationWeek contributor Daniel Kent, SDN separates itself from other attempts at making better use of bandwidth by offering opportunities to manage traffic in real time. This level of hands-on oversight allows administrators to identify unnecessary network requests and prevent them from sapping vital bandwidth. This ability will be extremely important moving forward as organizations look to add more connected assets to their enterprise environments.
“SDN has come about as the confluence of several technology strategies has made the network respond dynamically to applications and made it easier to manipulate the network in a standards-based manner,” Kent stated. “The ability and techniques used to program and control a network are essential to executing these strategies. This is more important than ever as new services and applications with different requirements are layered on top of the network.”
SDN demand on the rise
According to a recent TechNavio study, cloud computing is playing a major role in enterprise SDN adoption rates. Researchers predicted that the global software defined networking market will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 62.3 percent through the end of 2018, thanks in large part to the strain cloud services place on networks.
With SDN, companies could identify particular types of network traffic and assign them priority levels depending on their value to the enterprise. This way, important services such as cloud-based file-sharing applications or videoconferencing tools can be allocated more network resources than YouTube and other media-rich websites.
As Kent noted, the benefits of SDN go beyond resource management, explaining that the technology’s real-time monitoring can be used to address other concerns. For instance, administrators can protect the integrity of highly sensitive information when it is sent across the network by encrypting in-transit data packets. In addition, SDN allows companies to make more efficient use of their networks, managing various components like circuit speed to reduce operational costs.
Interest in SDN will continue
The myriad advantages of deploying SDN in a complex setting will continue to spur interest in the technology. CIMI Corporation president Tom Nolle recently stated that adoption rates for SDN are likely to increase dramatically in the coming years as more organizations conduct their own research and identify the performance-enhancing benefits that can be gained, according to CIO Insight contributor Samuel Greengard. Once these investigations have been completed, businesses will begin making the jump to SDN.
Greengard also quoted Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Bob Laliberte, who noted that SDN has distinguished itself by actually delivering on its promise. That may be music to the ears of business leaders who have been burned one too many times by silver-bullet acquisitions that fizzled upon deployment.
“Unlike much of the software-defined everything hype out there, software-defined networking actually represents a change in the way networks are architected,” Laliberte said, according to the source. “The goal is to create a far more agile and responsive network infrastructure that dramatically reduces the time required to provision the network and a variety of network services. If successful, SDN has the potential to enable the network to match the virtualized server environment in terms of speed and delivery of services.”
