I travel for work and, like most of us, I usually grab a bunch of travel supplies while at the grocery store, only to come home and realize I had most of these items stashed in my closet already.

To compete in the application economy, organizations often think they need to go on a massive IT shopping spree. In fact, most of the infrastructure they need is already inside the data center. They just need to make better use of it.

Fast track to transformation

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are key tenets of transformation, helping to not only maximize existing resources but also accelerate provisioning.

Despite the benefits, many CIOs have yet to take the leap. Although nearly half of organizations have virtualized more than 50 per cent of their servers and storage¹, the network is lagging behind.

Only nine per cent of organizations have broadly deployed SDN, even though 74 per cent believe it has an important role in their future IT strategy. So what’s holding them back? Investment cost.¹

I am going to let you in on a secret. Organizations can dip their toe in the SDN and NFV waters without writing a massive cheque.

Existing servers and switches can be adapted using open source software and a virtualization hypervisor to create a small-scale deployment within test or development. This can then be ramped up as processes and technologies mature.

Plug the visibility gap

Whether your deployment is big or small, embracing SDN and NFV will result in hybrid networking environments that demand an equally hybrid management approach.

Most of today’s IT infrastructure tools, however, were designed purely for the physical network world, which means virtualized and software-defined assets can’t be discovered, let alone monitored in real-time. This leaves a massive visibility and availability gap that could derail new business initiatives and degrade quality of service.

Organizations don’t just need IT monitoring tools that can bridge this gap; they need to unify people and processes too. With SDN and NFV, the lines between server and network operations become blurred – behind every virtual or software-defined component there is still a physical box.

Network transformation challenges more than just traditional IT architectures; it challenges how teams collaborate, how infrastructure issues are resolved, how new workloads are provisioned and how new apps are developed. And it challenges them for the better.

With 86 per cent of organizations admitting they need to improve business agility¹, failure to transform network operations will result in lost time and lost opportunities – and that means lost revenue. And no amount of investment and shopping sprees will get that back.

1 http://www.computacenter-enablingusers.com/articles/the-software-defined-survey-report-2015/

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