Software Defined Networking: The connective tissue for successful digital transformation

Digital transformation is a priority for business and a game changer to be competitive and responsive to market needs. However, CIOs say they don’t have adequate digital talent. Southeast Asia alone anticipates employee shortfall of between 600,000 and 1.2 million over the next 12 years (Source: 2018 CIO.com). Organizations have to partner externally with third party service providers to address this gap.

Cloud is at the heart of digital transformation. The core of digital transformation is how we leverage data – how we capture data, store data, make sense of data and utilize the data. Applications are increasingly distributed, not just in on-premise data centers but increasingly in SaaS and IaaS Public Clouds. It is essential for organizations to move data on cloud, to ensure that data spread across applications are available on the go.

Shifts to hybrid cloud is driving change within traditional networks, accelerating demands for hybrid cloud networks. Cloud has driven a need for agility at the speed of software. Traditional networks are hardware centric, manual, closed and reactive while today’s network for cloud need to be software driven, automated, programmable and pro-active.

Clients are at an inflection point with networking and the key challenges for them are management complexity, raising cost and lack of agility due to monolithic infrastructure. 59% companies list “legacy systems” as challenges that prevent moving their next set of workloads to cloud (Source: IBM Whitepaper “The confident move to cloud”)

You need to consider your network and ensure readiness as you embark on your digital transformation and successful journey to cloud. The underlying connective tissue is networking.

To address these challenges, enterprises need a software mediated network. As a leader in software defined networks (SDN), IBM helps you with consulting, deployment and managed services. IBM consulting services cover the entire SDN adoption process, including the strategy, requirements, planning, architecting, creating technology roadmaps, getting business buy-in, and making final recommendations for which technology would best meet the needs of the business. This ensure that enterprises need not deploy more network but the right network.

Read this SDN eBook to better understand SDN use cases and IBM capabilities for Software defined networking.