Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 04 | Page 38

FEATURE: CLOUD MANAGEMENT ‘SDN PROVIDES MULTIPLE BENEFITS THAT CAN BE SUMMARISED BY HAVING A NETWORK THAT IS ABLE TO SUPPORT THE MOST MODERN DATA CENTRE WORKLOADS AND CREATE OPEX AND CAPEX SAVINGS AT THE SAME TIME.’ remote locations where business must get done. For IT and business leaders, SD-WAN offers cost-effectiveness, agility, and levels of automation that are essential when accommodating dynamic business and application requirements. This new approach gives businesses the ability to automate and simplify many aspects of network configuration and management across the hundreds or thousands of remote sites that make up a large enterprise. This prospect is appealing to IT leaders not only from a business agility and cost reduction standpoint, but also from a performance and control perspective. Do right, SDWAN will mean that network teams will have an easier time managing finite network resources like bandwidth, while ensuring application SLAs are maintained, by steering applications and other services over the optimal network path. The SDN technology market was estimated to be worth $1.4 billion in 2015. One of the reasons is the trend toward wider adoption of SD-WAN 38 INTELLIGENTCIO solutions, which is sure to continue in 2016 and beyond. And in the Middle East, due to increased competition within technology hubs in emerging markets and the need for infrastructure transformation, there is even more scope for the integration of SD-WAN products. And while the market for an SDWAN solution begins to grow, the requirements for an excellent SD-WAN solution appear clearly: • Optimisation capabilities for on-premise and Cloud based applications like Office 365 or Salesforce.com. • A network and application aware path selection capability to direct traffic on the appropriate network (MPLS, Internet…). • Dynamic tunnelling with central control plane allowing secure backhauling of branch traffic to the corporate data centre across the Internet. • A simple interface to zScaler or other cloud-based security services enabling local Internet breakouts www.intelligentcio.com