Most IT shops are not built to be adaptive to Trends like cloud and mobility,” Iqbal said. “But this significantly impacts how DoD delivers its mission. That’s why it’s important to tear away from older systems and modernize to new ones. SDN helps virtualize many important functions while improving security and driving down costs.”
Provides programmability and agility to
Enabling defense agencies to keep pace with user demands. In many DoD datacenters, traditional hardware network appliances perform a single function on-premise and are costly to refresh. In contrast, a SDN approach offers the same key network functions as hardware appliances, as well as the flexibility to migrate those functions across platforms both in the datacenter and in the cloud.
Today, DoD is starting to explore SDN solutions.
Iqbal shared some tactics on how the department could do this effectively. “It’s all about how the enduser consumes applications and data”, he said. “The end user shouldn’t care about networks. He/She cares if the application is overseas chinese in canada data easy to use, secure, available and performs well. The end game of deploying SDN is to ensure apps and services can be delivered to users as quickly, efficiently and securely as possible while ensuring a high-quality experience.”
Another important consideration is security.
With cyberattacks becoming more application-centric, securing network infrastructure alone no longer provides adequate protection. A SDN approach what does facebook know about us and our friends ensures security is “native to the network” allowing concepts such as zero trust networks to become prevalent. Equally important is addressing core backend functions, like switching and routing. These functions are usually hardware-centric in DoD networks, meaning the evolution to new capabilities rich data requires a hardware refresh and when an application is migrated to cloud, the agency also has to buy a new set of capabilities for the cloud.
Instead of repeating the vicious hardware refresh cycle,
you need to take a step back and look at the whole picture,” Iqbal said. “With an SDN approach, your ability to deploy apps and achieve high-level performance and functionality is the same on any infrastructure – be it on premise or in the cloud. This is especially true for Appcentric Network Services beyond routing and switching such as App HA. SSL Proxy, App Firewall, DDOS Protection, and advanced analytics.”