Cloud WANs coming

We are on the move. Everywhere you look, someone is looking down at their mobile device, transacting, communicating, engaging, and are also perpetually in motion. The now antiquated business model of servers is fast being relegated to the dustbin of history, as we are operating in motion.

There is a whole mass of people in this world who have grown up on “now.” They don’t understand what “wait” even means. These sedentary servers and cumbersome, expensive, and onerous hardware will find a new home at the Smithsonian shortly! The speed of light and the speed at which technological change is happening today might soon become a tail of the tortoise and the hare.

Consumerization of IT

It is impossible to discuss Software-Defined Wans and Cloud WANs without discussing the one of the major reasons this is a growing trend: “consumerization of IT.” A major driver of this cloud trend, people introducing their smartphones, tablets and other devices into the workplace, leveraging networks at work with this device usage, and also opening up their employers to network security risks. With that, knowledge comes the very notion this is something that cannot be stopped. Moreover, companies have moved to embrace this trend fully recognizing they cannot stop it. “Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)” comes to mind as an emerging corporate policy on employees’ personal device use in the workplace. On some level, however, being able to quickly respond to this new standard is imperative. Today’s consumers can be better informed about IT trends and ways to use them for business thanks to Techtopia.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is the other part of this picture that is coming together showcasing what computing will looking like for the foreseeable future. This is essentially a move from hardware to software. All processes currently done with hardware are given up to a controller. The goal is to allow businesses to be more nimble and able to quickly respond to changing requirements. SDN allows changes across a fabric for network engineers. This saves money, it saves time, it provides greater efficiency, and it allows for exponential growth.

The Tail Wags the Dog

There is something going on with this move to cloud computing that is the antithesis of how change usually arrives. Normally the new technology is being thrust upon us as we are driven toward a new way of doing things. In the case of SDN, the movement is being led by entities clamoring for this change! The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a nonprofit trade organization, with such industry behemoth board members including Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Google, and Verizon, is leading the charge! They want this change, so much, so they organized a foundation to further their cause! They want to improve networking through SDNs and to establish standardization of open technologies.