point

Enterprise Networks Can Gain More Agility, Mobility with SDN

Takayoshi Oshima, Chairman & CEO, Allied Telesis Group
Friday, May 20, 2016
Takayoshi Oshima, Chairman & CEO, Allied Telesis Group
Headquartered in Tokyo, Allied Telesis Group specializes in providing business-critical services like Software Defined Networking, IP Surveillance Networking, Ethernet, Converged Infrastructure, Managed Services to a vast global clientele.

SDN enables enterprises to easily add new devices and apps on the network, and significantly improves user experience by enabling new trends like BYOD and mobility. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has proven to be a very attractive technology among service providers and data center operators; however enterprises are taking longer to be convinced of its benefits. Although it first gained attention more than 15 years ago, many enterprises believe SDN is still not a proven technology. They fear that there is too much risk associated with its deployment in mission-critical networks and so remain reluctant to make use of it within their infrastructures.

As is the case with many evolving technologies, attitudes can often be based on perceptions rather than solid facts. Perceptions of SDN have been created through media coverage which has tended to focus on the service provider point of view. While acknowledging that SDN is delivering significant benefits in this sector, the coverage rarely looks at roll-outs in the enterprise space and the benefits that have been delivered there.

Attention has also tended to focus on the benefits of SDN that are of most interest to service providers which include network agility and better link utilization. However these are not the key benefits that enterprises seek and so many are unable to see any real value in the technology.

At its heart, SDN involves the abstraction of high-level networking functions from the underlying hardware. This allows network managers to make connection and bandwidth changes in software without needing to touch the hardware components.


Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook