The next era of Networking…
Over the years, we have become used to waves of technology innovation, constantly resetting our personal expectations about what “normal” means for the way we experience and benefit from these technologies.
Once upon a time – though not really a long, long time ago – we were used to “The Network” growing organically, bit by bit, as new technologies were invented and different companies then created their own different ways in which to get those technologies working for us. Initially, these differences gave us “choice” in how we approached building our networks, but that diversity quickly evolved into complexity that slowed the evolution of the network to the point where it no longer kept up with the pace of essential change in our businesses.
We ended up with overcrowded Data Centers, packed with individual servers delivering separate applications. We personally carried a bag full of gadgets, each for one specific purpose (SatNav, music player, camera, video recorder, even an alarm clock). Unknown to many of us, the Comms Rooms in our workplaces were filling up with stacks of appliances such as routers, firewalls and Windows servers for essential tools such as Directory Services or Point-of-Sale solutions.
Then, we encountered a revolution in the way we built and managed these systems. In the Data Center, we collapsed those physical servers into virtual machines that could share a common compute platform. Most importantly, we introduced tools to automate and orchestrate how this happened, drastically accelerating the introduction of new services and giving birth to the Cloud as we know it today. In the same way, the introduction of the Smart Phone meant that we could convert all those physical gadgets into Apps that sat on just one device in our pocket – but crucially, with tools such as an App Store that automated getting all those new features on to our devices, along with centralised policies such as security updates. Thus emerged the mobile lifestyle that we would be lost without today.
Those automation platforms then became central hubs for collecting data about the operational state of the end devices, providing a platform for rich analytics such as for detecting and remediating security vulnerabilities and malfunctioning or sub-optimally configured devices, or for end-user applications such as Wi-Fi location services. Finally, perhaps most importantly, these platforms were opened up through APIs, extending the scope for innovative development from the suppliers’ Engineering Teams to a global community and introducing us to Software Defined Networking and Network Programmability.
With these developments transforming the Data Center and our mobile devices, the missing link in this story was how we approached the Enterprise Network and our Branches, where device proliferation was equally omnipresent. Cisco is now addressing this gap with the Digital Network Architecture: an open, extensible, software-driven approach that combines the power of virtualization, automation, orchestration and analytics to transform the way we deploy and manage the Campus, WAN and Branch networks.
Cisco DNA enables the network to accelerate to keep up with today’s rapid pace of business change, removing many painful and expensive operational barriers while delivering enhanced benefits such as deployment agility, Enterprise-wide security and software-driven policy management.
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