Flexibility

Networks were traditionally designed for speed rather than flexibility. But in today's world, where services can be moved from the on-premises data center to a cloud provider in a matter of minutes, the network needs to be able to support the services regardless of where they are being delivered from. In other words, the network needs to change and adapt to ensure optimal service delivery even though the service is now being delivered from the cloud and not the on-premises data center.

Today's networks are converged networks and carry different types of traffic on a converged network infrastructure. This traffic could be operational domain traffic, IT traffic, voice, or even CCTV traffic. Different applications have different demands from the network and the network has to be able to cater to all of these. These requirements include the ability to add new traffic types or even virtual networks on demand without influencing existing traffic/networks, or the ability to temporarily extend a network topology to serve events such as an ad hoc multicast from the CEO to all employees within the organization and the ability to reconfigure the network in real-time for resilience.

This brings us to the discussion that the network needs to be flexible so that it can be changed quickly. An organization using a broadband internet to build a secure connection between two sites until such time as the leasing MPLS circuit from the service provider can be commissioned is a practical example of network flexibility.

Companies that aim for agility and flexibility are transforming from conventional hardware-centric network deployment and are reaping the benefits of technologies such as NFV and SDN to make their networks more agile and flexible.

Furthermore, these organizations are deploying tools that can automate the operational tasks to ensure that the changes are done with speed and security minimizing the chances of human error.