Technology changes fast, and today it’s changing faster than ever to keep up with enterprise digital strategies. Companies are focused on leveraging technology for new products and services that give them an edge over the competition. IT teams must act quickly to keep up with the business demand for speed and new capabilities, but legacy architectures fall short, forcing them to look for new solutions.
For IT infrastructure, this means big changes and a shift away from old paradigms. Traditional gear such as dedicated servers,storage arrays, and network switches remain core elements in many environments, but IT organizations are increasingly looking to software, cloud, automation and open source. They’re leveraging system software, automating processes, and adopting cloud-based services and platforms.
In the data center, companies are focused on managing workloads more efficiently both internally and externally. They’re migrating some workloads to the cloud and using virtualization in their on-premises facilities to increase agility and cut costs.
Hypervisors have become commonplace and are giving way to container technology, which provides a more efficient and portable way to virtualize applications. New products and vendors are emerging to support, manage, and secure Docker and other container technologies.
Networking is evolving to keep up with the fast pace of digital transformation. An industry that had been distinguished by hardware speeds and feeds and manual configuration of boxes is shifting to a focus on software and automation. Legacy models have given way to software-based approaches that provide flexibility and agility in the cloud era.
Software-defined networking has gained traction in the service provider market and is making its way into the enterprise, albeit slowly. However, a closely related technology, software-defined WAN, is becoming a popular option for companies of all sizes looking to reduce costs and gain efficiencies. SDN and the ability to abstract network software from the underlying hardware have given rise to white-box and bare-metal options in which networking software, often open source, can be installed on commodity hardware.
Another emerging trend is intent-based networking, which incorporates machine-learning to orchestrate and automate network configuration, and provide visibility into network status.
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