Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 07 | Page 63

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Software for Business Software will save the network Legacy network technologies can no longer guarantee quick and reliable connections explains Greg Montjoie, Executive: SDN/ Internet Access at Internet Solutions. Greg Montjoie, Executive: SDN/Internet Access at Internet Solutions C onsumers, clients and stakeholders no longer accept ‘the network is down’ as an explanation for service or business failure. Just like manual exchanges were soon overrun by the demands of early telephone services, today’s networks are strained by the business demand for more bandwidth, more optimisation, more dynamism, more value. Modern wide area networks are all about hardware and humans. Hubs, routers, switches, proxy servers www.intelligentcio.com and firewalls, network architects and engineers to install the hardware, then connect, configure and test it manually. Optimising an existing network with limited analytics and inaccurate performance benchmarking is difficult. Customising a network is impossible. As data traffic and network complexity between business sites becomes more substantial, as devices are added to the enterprise WAN and as the likelihood of remote offices and branches in multiple markets increases, legacy network “I anticipate that software-defined networking (SDN) will disrupt business ICT as dramatically as the cloud did.” INTELLIGENTCIO 63