Rethinking the network for digital transformation
Sponsored content written & produced by Studio 61 of CBS Interactive’s marketing unit in collaboration with the sponsor, Riverbed.
Published on 3/20/2018
Published on 3/20/2018
Digital transformation is fast becoming the way of the future for all businesses in the Asia-Pacific region. According to IDC, in 2017, 60 percent of the Asia Pacific top 1000 enterprises will have digital transformation at the centre of their corporate strategy.
According to IDC, the digital transformation journey requires businesses to have agile infrastructures and address the threat of digital disruption. For that to happen, from a technology perspective, the successful adoption of cloud services is the foundation that underpins all of these innovation efforts.
In a survey of ZDNet and Tech Republic readers, 28 percent of respondents said the call to develop a digital transformation strategy came from all corners of the organisation. The breakdown from the respondents shows that while IT was the driver…
According to a Tech Pro Research report on digital transformation, there were other barriers to companies undergoing digital transformation projects. The report shows a Harvard Business Review and Scout RFP survey of senior executives voted the following as the top five barriers to digital transformation:
53%
Inability to experiment quickly.
54%
Legacy systems.
51%
Inability to work across silos.
49%
Inadequate collaboration between IT and lines of business.
47%
Risk-averse culture.
Bringing Calm To The Network Chaos
This need for greater agility and control to manage environments and embrace digital transformation more effectively has produced evolutionary advances. One such example is software-defined networking (SDN), which offers the next step in network traffic control. This is where software and policies are used to define consistent network behaviour and responses -- rather than relying on a conglomeration of individual hardware devices, each with their own configuration.
As network traffic continues to increase -- caused by the growth of the sheer number of apps we all depend on, together with the universal use of bandwidth-intensive applications such as video and real-time collaboration -- the demand for bandwidth continues to increase at a high rate. For cheaper capacity, enterprises have added internet broadband links to their existing MPLS networks. According to IDC, 40-60 percent of enterprise data traffic is migrating from private WANs to the internet.
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SDN leverages principles of automation and intelligent management. It can direct network traffic to least-used resources in a load-balancing arrangement so that redundant systems can share workloads more effectively. This increases network and system response times and in turn can lead to better applications that are well-suited to utilise these advantages. In addition, SDN offers better scalability and the ability to control heterogeneous environments such as a local datacentres linked with cloud services.
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Customers Talk SD-WAN
What does a SD-WAN look like in a live setting? Privately held company OpenEye Scientific -- with offices in Boston, Cologne and Tokyo -- was founded in 1997. The company develops large-scale molecular modelling applications and toolkits that are primarily used for drug discovery and design, reducing time to market for new pharmaceuticals.
Partly, that was because we would have needed a partner to do the last mile, Bruce explained.
That's when OpenEye started looking into software-defined networking (SDN).
SDN seemed much more appealing in that we could buy a smaller amount of hardware, he said.
Also, the SDN approach would be the obvious way to allow us to scale up quickly.
Bruce said OpenEye settled on Riverbed® SteelConnect™ for Amazon Web Services because the product's tight integration with AWS was very appealing. It let OpenEye connect multiple accounts very easily because SteelConnect™ has a full understanding of its network topology.
Challenge
Solution
Benefit
IT and the use of emerging technology are foundational to how GHD delivers successfully to its clients. In addition to leveraging more than 3000 business and technical applications -- many of which are data and bandwidth intensive design tools -- GHD hosts its own cloud to support ongoing client needs. It is an effective but complex environment that powers the collaboration of global project teams as well as client engagement.
According to Harper, SteelConnect™ allows GHD to preconfigure a device using a cloud portal before delivering it to the physical site.
"This means that a non-IT person at the small office can follow simple instructions, plug the device in, and have everything up and running in minutes instead of days," she said.
Challenge
Solution
Benefit
Seamless Network Access
Taming the chaos of IT requires a new approach to networking, so networks can provide seamless access to digital services for end-users. No matter what type of organisation you are, with IT more distributed, hybrid, and dynamic than ever, hardware-bound legacy networks won't be able to meet those challenges.
Achieving each of these goals requires both a complete rethink of networking as well as a large number of technical innovations, capabilities, and integrations to transform the complex into the simple, the manual into the automated, and the fragmented into a unified whole. SD-WAN provides organisations with the ability to use business policies to automate and orchestrate all the components of digital access across a global, unified network.
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SD-WAN Videos
Find out:
- Real answers about SD-WAN (i.e. what it is, the problems it solves and why businesses need it)
- A close-up look at how SD-WAN actually works
- Considerations and guidelines for a successful SD-WAN deployment