It is no surprise that in this year's State of the Network annual survey of network professionals, Software-Defined Networks (SDN) was the prevailing topic. Yet in 2009, it wasn't even on the radar. And while SDN is all the buzz, this year's survey showed that not everyone is on the same page. In fact, when asked to define SDN, 37 percent of the network managers and engineers defined SDN as being "like a road trip without a map".
Click on picture to download a PDF of the State of the Network infographic
While no clear definition of SDN could be agreed upon, it was very clear that SDN has IT talking, with 12 percent regarding SDN as critical.
The survey also showed that IT departments are at odds with each other as to how important SDN is to a company and why. About 47 percent, nearly half, of network management did not think SDN was important, while more than half of network engineers said they'd just ride out the hype.
That being said, adoption amongst participants is projected to grow at a steady pace from the 12 percent of early adopters today, to 22 percent of respondents indicating they will have SDN in place by the end of 2014 and 32 percent by the end of 2015.
Why? Because SDN is not just about cost reduction — it's about making an organization agile. The top drivers of SDN cited in the State of the Network survey included the need to improve the network's ability to dynamically adapt to changing business demands (48 percent) and to deliver new services faster (40 percent). Others indicated lowering operating expenses, decreasing capital expenses, improving the ability to provision network infrastructure and designing more realistic network infrastructures as reasons behind SDN deployment.
With the many major initiatives IT is juggling, such as Big Data, Cloud services, Unified Communications (UC), Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and 40Gb deployment, it is no wonder that IT departments have SDN in their sights. Whether network professionals can define it or not, many are rapidly deploying SDN while others seem to be evaluating what is hype vs. tangible benefits for their company before future deployment.
About the State of the Network Global Study: The State of the Network Global Study has been conducted annually for seven years. This year, Network Instruments engaged 241 network professionals to understand and quantify new technology adoption trends and daily IT challenges. Respondents were asked, via a third-party web portal, to answer a series of questions on the impact, challenges, and benefits of SDN, UC, Big Data and Application Performance Management. The results were based on responses by network engineers, IT directors, and CIOs from around the globe. Responses were collected from January 10, 2014 to March 7, 2014.
The Latest
App sprawl has been a concern for technologists for some time, but it has never presented such a challenge as now. As organizations move to implement generative AI into their applications, it's only going to become more complex ... Observability is a necessary component for understanding the vast amounts of complex data within AI-infused applications, and it must be the centerpiece of an app- and data-centric strategy to truly manage app sprawl ...
Fundamentally, investments in digital transformation — often an amorphous budget category for enterprises — have not yielded their anticipated productivity and value ... In the wake of the tsunami of money thrown at digital transformation, most businesses don't actually know what technology they've acquired, or the extent of it, and how it's being used, which is directly tied to how people do their jobs. Now, AI transformation represents the biggest change management challenge organizations will face in the next one to two years ...
As businesses focus more and more on uncovering new ways to unlock the value of their data, generative AI (GenAI) is presenting some new opportunities to do so, particularly when it comes to data management and how organizations collect, process, analyze, and derive insights from their assets. In the near future, I expect to see six key ways in which GenAI will reshape our current data management landscape ...
The rise of AI is ushering in a new disrupt-or-die era. "Data-ready enterprises that connect and unify broad structured and unstructured data sets into an intelligent data infrastructure are best positioned to win in the age of AI ...
A majority (61%) of organizations are forced to evolve or rethink their data and analytics (D&A) operating model because of the impact of disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, according to a new Gartner survey ...
The power of AI, and the increasing importance of GenAI are changing the way people work, teams collaborate, and processes operate ... Gartner identified the top data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2024 that are driving the emergence of a wide range of challenges, including organizational and human issues ...
IT and the business are disconnected. Ask the business what IT does and you might hear "they implement infrastructure, write software, and migrate things to cloud," and for some that might be the extent of their knowledge of IT. Similarly, IT might know that the business "markets and sells and develops product," but they may not know what those functions entail beyond the unit they serve the most ...
Cloud spending continues to soar. Globally, cloud users spent a mind-boggling $563.6 billion last year on public cloud services, and there's no sign of a slowdown ... CloudZero's State of Cloud Cost Report 2024 found that organizations are still struggling to gain control over their cloud costs and that a lack of visibility is having a significant impact. Among the key findings of the report ...
The use of hybrid multicloud models is forecasted to double over the next one to three years as IT decision makers are facing new pressures to modernize IT infrastructures because of drivers like AI, security, and sustainability, according to the Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report from Nutanix ...
Over the last 20 years Digital Employee Experience has become a necessity for companies committed to digital transformation and improving IT experiences. In fact, by 2025, more than 50% of IT organizations will use digital employee experience to prioritize and measure digital initiative success ...
