By Saurabh Sandhir Software Defined Networking (SDN) is disrupting the networking industry as never before. SDN started as an academic exercise to separate the control plane from the data plane in networking devices but found it’s bearing as a way to automate and instantiate network state in highly scaled and dynamic datacenter/cloud environments. The use cases for SDN in the datacenter span from IaaS, PaaS and Service Chaining to Datacenter Interconnect, Hybrid cloud and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization).
By Mark Weiner Branch offices are an important location to secure. Gartner estimates that by 2016 more than 30 percent of advanced threats will target the most vulnerable entry point of the enterprise – the branch office. But deploying advanced security in branch networks is often a challenge and there are three reasons for this:
By David Klebanov Many organizations have embarked on the journey of adopting the public cloud. For some it had become a new norm of delivering infrastructure and applications, while others view it as means of augmenting their existing on-premise resources. Whatever the case may be, the question of architecting wide area network connectivity to the cloud is one of the most fundamental building blocks of delivering robust, secure and reliable user experience.
by Brian Promes Competitive pressures and changes in the business environment are pushing many organizations toward digital transformation. Enterprises, communication services providers, and managed services companies are all trying to leverage digital technologies and change in their business processes to build in more speed, agility and efficiency.
by Nick Lippis As the ONUG Community ventures down the path of a hybrid cloud-based software-defined world, it becomes abundantly clear that operational teams are without the tools needed to operationalize their proof of concepts. A new comprehensive tool suite is needed for the software-defined enterprise. The tools of most interest: those that deliver monitoring and analytics of an application’s infrastructure dependency map. That is, all the physical and virtual components that an application relies upon to deliver its value.
by Nick Lippis ONUG offers, bar none, the best indicator of what’s real in the industry. At UBS headquarters in September of 2013, the ONUG Board met to define the major themes and narrative for ONUG Fall 2013 hosted by JPMorgan Chase. This was during the hype of OpenFlow, OpenDayLight and OpenStack. During that meeting, the ONUG Board realized that none of these projects would be game changers and that ONUG would chart a practical course that enabled the ONUG Community to embrace freedom, choice,…
by Nick Lippis The public voice of IT business leaders has been muted over the past two decades. Part of this was due to corporate PR, legal, and mitigation teams forbidding IT executives from speaking in public. Part of the cause was the lack of forums available for IT leaders to collaborate and exchange successes and challenges. Part of the cause was old fashion thinking about what was strategic. But ONUG changed all that and its implications will be wide spread! Consider this a start….
by Nick Lippis Gone are the days when enterprise security was defined by physical firewalls and IPS devices placed in a DMZ and programmed with rules that either allowed or denied access. It’s not that these security appliances are not needed or important anymore, it’s just that they are legacy, hardware-based, inflexible gatekeeper devices that were build for an older world and application portfolio. Network security, like all hardware-based appliances, is rapidly being disaggregated from hardware and software so that security services can be applied…
by Nick Lippis The two largest barriers of entry of the software-defined revolution are skills and tools. The Software-Defined Enterprise will not become a reality unless there are new monitoring and analytic tools as well as new infrastructure DevOps engineers with the skills to put the tools to work. At ONUG, we’ve seen the lack of uptick in data center overlay deployments for this very reason; there is currently no visibility of underlay/overlay and especially trouble event causality. And don’t expect VMware, Docker, Amazon, Microsoft,…
by Nick Lippis One of the great ONUG success stories is the creation of the SD-WAN market. Its inception took place on an April day in 2013 when the ONUG Board convened for its twice-yearly, face-to-face meeting at UBS headquarters. During this meeting, ONUG Board members shared use cases for which they required solutions that suppliers were not yet providing or addressing.