Networks Of The Future: How 2013 And Beyond Will Look

2012 was a big year for IT with cloud services going mainstream and the fundamentals of the way we view computers changing. Business and personal computing devices and applications are merging to make life easier for everyone and 2013 is set to be another big year for the industry.

While many of us don’t see or fully understand the infrastructure that drives this change, it is happening and in a big way. Virtualisation has bought about significant changes but it looks like we are verge or in fact already on the move to next iteration/approach to networking. So what will this new approach be and how will it compare?

Was the Cloud just the Beginning?

Cloud computing has brought significant changes to IT systems in recent years. For businesses, the biggest change was in no longer needing to maintain their own IT infrastructure; rather, they could make use of the necessary facilities dynamically, via a network.

‘Virtualisation has paved the way for much needed flexibility in IT services,’ said an expert from Everyware AG. As far as future needs can be predicted, it seems that flexibility and efficiency may no longer be enough, greater levels of automation may be required too.

Is Software Defined Networking a Solution?

Software Defined Networking is one of the hottest IT topics this new year. ‘At the SDN network, control of software and hardware becomes independent,’ says Everyware.

The decisions controlling the transport of data packets are made on the SDN control plane, and the underlying data plane is decoupled. Therefore, companies will have much greater flexibility in storage, as no physical network transformations are required.

Processes like providing the required bandwidth, monitoring services and security responses will be faster. The new concept will change cloud computing as the administrator will be able to flexibly manage the data by means of traffic-shaping.

Some companies have already begun implementing and testing software defined network solutions but it is still very early days. However there is a big opportunity for vendors here and could become the next thing.

It will be interesting to see how this shapes both consumer and business computing and of course we would love to hear your thoughts on software defined networking. Will it work or is it just another fad?