Getting on the Path to SDN with Juniper Networks

A number of IT trends—including the consumerization of IT, cloud computing, and social media— present significant opportunities for businesses to improve productivity. Before adopting these technologies, however, organizations try to fully understand the impact they will have on the underlying infrastructure and, more specifically, the network environment, since it is a critical enabler for all of these services. As a result organizations are looking to innovation in the network to meet their business needs.

Trends Impacting the Network
As organizations continue to innovate and expand their virtualized environments beyond the simple benefits of consolidation to a more agile infrastructure, they have begun to build out private clouds. These agile IT environments enable business managers to rapidly turn up new services to meet unexpected demand or requirements. However, this abstraction layer can create blind spots in the infrastructure and make meeting compliance requirements difficult.

Social media applications present another challenge as the explosion in the number of network-connected devices opens up avenues to new applications and collaboration tools. Well known applications such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter often blur the lines between business and personal usage and video create demands on the network. The question is how to ensure performance, while protecting data ensuring privacy.