Changing Requirements Call for New Solutions
Today, every industry is being reshaped by technology. Traditional data centers are morphing as apps and data migrate across clouds, to the edges of the network and back. This digital transformation has the ability to lower IT costs and improve efficiency, visibility, and performance while driving business innovation.
This new reality is exciting—and it has major implications for the network. As IT teams attempt to manage, secure, connect, and maintain compliance wherever applications live, they can’t do it without a fully virtualized infrastructure. Legacy networks, or a mix of different systems that must be managed and run independently, can cause major delays and create security gaps that businesses simply can’t afford.
IT needs a modern networking solution that brings consistency and security across private and public clouds, and a level of automation that streamlines multi-cloud operations and frees up the business to focus on innovation.
Business Success and IT Infrastructure Are Connected
Business objectives and IT capabilities are more tightly linked than ever before. Applications are critical to the success of the business, and IT teams are responsible for securing and connecting these applications in an increasingly distributed world.
IT teams are under pressure from the business to:
- Ensure that applications are “always on.” When apps go down, it puts the business at risk. From lost sales to diminished credibility to lower productivity, the significant cost of downtime has eliminated the concept of an “acceptable outage.”
- Make efficient use of public and private cloud resources. Many businesses invested in the cloud expecting costs to drop dramatically—but without a strategic approach to managing these resources, clouds can create new silos and drive costs up.
- Streamline management and operations across clouds. Adopting multiple clouds often add new layers of complexity for IT, making it even harder for the business to be agile and innovative. That’s the exact opposite of how it should be.
Architecting a New Network
As more businesses take advantage of the public cloud, they often expect that agility will follow. But without a unified foundation, the cloud can make your IT operations even more complex and slow down service delivery. What’s needed is the ability to simplify network operations and define a new model for the digital enterprise.
Networking in Software Simplifies Cloud Adoption
When network operations are abstracted from underlying hardware and services, and delivered entirely in software, something magical happens. What was previously slow, inflexible, and highly dependent on manual intervention becomes fast and streamlined. Critical network services, such as switching, routing, firewalling, and load balancing, now live closer to individual applications, which gives you more visibility and control.
Quite simply, network virtualization enables levels of agility, security, and economics that were previously impossible with legacy networks based in hardware. It ensures consistent connectivity and security across the enterprise, and provides the flexibility and programmability that you need to adapt as technology evolves.
Instead of struggling to keep up with multiple data centers and clouds, you’ll be able to bring consistency across all your sites and a level of automation that simplifies day-to-day operations. Even better, you’ll be able to meet the needs of the business with confidence.
Three Reasons to Consider Network Virtualization
A hardware-agnostic, software-based solution enables your network to be flexible, programmable, and designed for future innovation. Why virtualize your network now?
- So you can make applications more resilient and minimize the impact of planned maintenance and migrations. In a virtualized network, applications are decoupled from the underlying infrastructure, making them location-agnostic. Networking and security services span multiple sites, so applications can be run closest to the point of use, improving both response time and user experience. VMs and entire data centers can be migrated with zero downtime.
- So you can start easily running applications across multiple environments and enable important use cases. A virtualized network gives IT the ability to create a unified, seamless, and resilient pool of infrastructure resources to run applications across multiple data centers and clouds. This improves both capacity utilization and availability, helps support disaster avoidance, and minimizes planned downtime for data center upgrades and security patches. It also allows for scenarios like data center migration, data center consolidation, or mergers and acquisitions.
- So you can reduce the complexity of IT operations. Network virtualization extends a common operational model into the cloud, enabling combinations of private and public clouds in ways not possible before. It gives IT teams the freedom and control to connect and secure applications across multiple clouds with consistent networking and security, and uses automation to streamline management and operations, allowing for more strategic approaches to delivering services to the business.
Bring Your Network Up to Date
To support the digital enterprise, IT can now take a new approach to networking with built-in multi-cloud flexibility that helps the businesses stay flexible and prepared for the future.
If you’re ready to streamline operations, reduce TCO, and build the confidence to meet whatever tomorrow brings, contact Plow Networks today.
About Plow Networks
Headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, Plow Networks is a Total Service Provider (TSP) with several distinct business practices that, when consumed together, offer our clients a unique, best-in-class experience. We give organizations peace of mind, valuable time back and the economies of scale that come with having one technology partner that is focused on exceeding their expectations with every engagement.
