Research: Leaders share software-defined networking’s benefits, obstacles, favored vendors (TechRepublic Premium)
This archived TechRepublic Premium report, originally published in May 2013, is available for free to registered TechRepublic members. For all the latest research reports, 100+ ready-made policies, IT job descriptions, and more, check out TechRepublic Premium.
From the report:
Traditional network management typically requires setting up each network-attached device individually. For example, configuring a virtual local area network (VLAN) access control list on a set of Cisco switches necessitates logging into each and making the necessary adjustments. While this approach has worked somewhat successful- ly in the past, it doesn’t scale well when organizations add BYOD and numerous cloud services to their networks.
Today, the objective of network management is to allow various devices (company-, vendor-, or employee-owned) to connect to our networks with access and usage constraints based on the who-what-when-where-how-why of each session. This requires consistent application of policies across all devices. Further, an administrator making a policy change should not have to spend hours making individual device changes, and those changes must be consistent across the enterprise. This is the role of software- defined networking (SDN).
Many IT leaders are unfamiliar with SDN. As a result, in April, TechRepublic conducted an online survey to find out who is using SDN, why they plan to implement it, and the results they’ve experienced.
The survey found that at least 50 percent of the respondents didn’t know anything about SDN. Since this survey confirmed our belief that SDN is unfamiliar to many, the following section will give an overview of this network management approach before we delve into the survey results.
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