Time is ripe for organizations to harness the agile software-defined WAN for accelerated innovation and business agility to advance towards the final lap of DX.
By Nagendra Venkaswamy
The race towards digital transformation (DX) is on. Organizations are increasingly gearing up for DX in order to drive new sources of competitive differentiation and successful business outcomes. Driven by a combination of customer expectations and major advances in key enabling technologies, it’s a race that’s disrupting business models across all industries. And nowhere is this truer than in Asia Pacific, a region accelerating its pace of DX as observed by IDC in a recent whitepaper.
Yet despite the intensifying speed of change – and the more than 60% of the region’s largest organizations slated to move DX to the center of their corporate strategy by the end of 2017 – almost half (45.4%) of them are still at a nascent stage of DX, operating on an ad-hoc level1. This is the first stage of DX maturity, where basic DX capabilities and digital solutions have yet to be established and adopted – a stage where the organization’s ability to react to, anticipate, and disrupt the industries they operate in is limited. So what’s causing the unusually long hold up at this pit stop?
Accelerating innovation on legacy networks
Organizations are arguably looking to advance towards the finish line for DX because it has the potential to positively impact almost every area that matters to the business: revenue growth, efficiency, cost-savings, security and compliance to name a few. Yet many fail to take into consideration the significant demands placed by DX and cloud-first initiatives on the network. Consider: apps growing in number and coming from everywhere, 3.7 billion connected devices and 6.75TB of data consumption per user per day by 20182, as well as added complexities as organizations move towards a hybrid cloud future.
While the remainder of the IT stack has evolved significantly to meet the demands of the digital enterprise, the network hasn’t evolved as quickly. It’s no wonder APAC organizations are lagging behind. Much like a sleek, cutting-edge car running on an outdated engine would fail to break any speed records, implementing shiny new disruptive technologies on outdated legacy networks will most likely result in a failure to scale digital initiatives.3 In order to cope with the increasing demands of a cloud-centric world, a fundamental rethink of how the network is built and managed is needed.
Rethinking the network with SD-WAN
Legacy approaches to managing distributed networks and routing – which are hardware-bound, hard-coded, inflexible and error-prone – haven’t changed much in 20 years. The good news is that networks are finally starting to move out of the pit lane and on to the racetrack. In a digital era that demands unrivaled business and IT agility, the introduction of technologies like software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) as well as radical new application-defined approaches to the wide-area network (WAN) are helping an increasing number of enterprises smoothly shift gears for success.
An IDC WAN and Communication survey conducted last year found enterprises in the APAC region citing three major imperatives around implementing flexible networking solutions like software-defined WAN (SD-WAN).
Reduced hardware costs from the migration of edge equipment into the network and implementing network functions on consolidated appliance platforms
A holistic and centrally controlled management over public and private cloud infrastructures
Highly responsive delivery of real-time data to support business functions in an rapidly changing marketplace
Entering the final lap with SD-WAN
While it’s been established that network virtualization can give organizations a head start in the race to DX, the following components need to be considered:
Evolve your race strategy: To be successful, DX has to be an enterprise strategy, merging and evolving IT capabilities holistically across enterprise infrastructure, in concert with the evolution of digital business models. This requires an overarching vision for the evolution of that architecture, and a comprehensive strategy that allows for end-to-end automation of the IT stack – from the add-on applications and down to the underlying end points.
It’s a team effort to nail the pit stop: While drivers often get the recognition, racing is a team sport. Partner well with ICT vendors who understand and are influencing the evolving network landscape and those that have a strong ecosystem of knowledgeable and relevant partners.
Records are only broken when they are conscientiously measured: If it’s not measured, it does not go down as a record. In the constantly changing Asia Pacific business landscape, organizations need to monitor, measure and analyze in order to gain a better understanding of how workloads and application deployments are placing additional demands on the network so that they can continue to evolve their strategy.
The network is the driving force in meeting the needs of the future enterprise – it needs to be flexible and adaptable to handle the increasing demands of disruptive technologies and business models. It’s time for organizations to harness the agile software-defined WAN for accelerated innovation and business agility to advance towards the final lap of DX.
The author is vice president, India and South Asia at Riverbed Technology