Top Five Apps and Services That Can Benefit from SDN

Security Services. The modern virtualization ecosystem supports specific virtual services running within the network layer. This means incorporating functions like NFV into SDN platforms. This type of network security creates a truly proactive environment capable of reducing risk and responding to incidents much more quickly. When a breach occurs, every second is critical in stopping the attack. Also important is the capability to identify the attack and ensure that other network components are safe. As the network layer becomes even more critical -- and as the modern organization becomes even more digitized – we’ll see more attacks and more sophisticated advanced persistent threats. By integrating powerful security services into the SDN layer, you help create a more proactive environment that’s capable of responding to change.

Network Intelligence and Monitoring. Modern SDN technologies are helping abstract one of the most critical layers within the data center: the network. Network architectures are much more complex and have to handle more data than ever before. This means knowing what’s flowing through your environment is critical. Do you have latency issues on a port? What if you’re running a heterogeneous network architecture? Or, are you heavily virtualized and are passing a lot of traffic through the network layer? All of these challenges are alleviated when you have a solid network intelligence and monitoring layer. However, you gain true insight and benefit by integrating these technologies into your SDN architecture. Traffic flow, port configurations, hypervisor integration, alerting, and even optimization can be integrated into network intelligence and monitoring technologies. Most of all, these types of agile systems will further help you monitor network traffic between your data center and your cloud ecosystem.

Compliance and Regulation-Bound Applications. Major cloud vendors are now offering the capability to store and work with compliance-bound workloads. Now, organizations have the option of extending architectures which were originally very limited because of regulations into distributed environments and the cloud. But how do you segment the traffic? How do you ensure that compliance and regulation workloads are persistently secured and monitored? This is where SDN can help. Network traffic traveling between switches, network points, and even hypervisors can all be controlled in an SDN architecture. Remember, this layer abstracts virtual functions and hardware controls. This powerful layer can then span various locations, virtualization points, and even cloud locations.

High-Performance Applications. We’re seeing a boom in new types of application technologies. Virtualization has allowed the delivery of rich apps like GIS, CAD, engineering, and graphics design software. Traditionally, these workloads needed bare-metal architectures with their own connection. However, with virtualization, applications are streamed and VDI can help create powerful desktop experiences. However, at the network layer we also see the integration of SDN into application control. Creating powerful QoS policies, securing confidential data, segmenting heavy traffic, and even creating threshold alerts around bottlenecks. All of these functions within SDN help support high-performance, rich applications which are being delivered via virtualization.

Distributed Application Control and Cloud Integration. One of the biggest benefits of SDN is its capability to extend across the entire data center. This type of agility integrates distributed locations, cloud, and the entire organization. SDN allows for critical network traffic to pass between various locations, regardless of the type of underlying network architecture. By abstracting critical network controls you allow for easier movement of data between data center and cloud locations. Because SDN is a form of network virtualization, you can use powerful APIs to not only integrate with a cloud provider; you can control specific network services as well. This allows you to granularly manage your workloads while keeping your business agile.