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SDN and NFV Can Help Safeguard Service Continuity and Quality in a Digital Age

Jeremy Rossbach

The application economy has put the digital consumer in the driving seat. They dictate when, where and how they want services delivered. Whether they are using a smartphone or a laptop, digital consumers all want one thing – speed. To be productive at work and play, they need to be in the fast lane, and so do businesses and their networks.

Building a network fit for the application economy means transformation, optimization and virtualization. Today’s networks and processes will not be sufficient to meet digital consumers’ expectations for agility and availability. Services will suffer downtime. Applications will be slow to respond. And digital consumers will be quick to find an alternative. Their expectations are high as recent research reveals that 80-90% of all consumer applications will only be used once.

Embracing new technologies, such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), will be key to safeguarding application performance and service continuity in a digital age.

However, organizations must invest and innovate with care. SDN and NFV are both disruptive technologies, which means they have the capacity to both enable and encumber application economy initiatives.

Catalyst for Change

When implementing SDN or NFV, businesses must plan not just for technological change but also operational and cultural change. Performance and fault management will no longer just be about fixing individual issues, but optimizing an overall service to enrich the experience for digital consumers.

To take a more holistic, user-focused approach to performance and fault management, CIOs will need to encourage greater collaboration between teams as well as embed service assurance into their SDN and NFV environments.

As Paul Parker-Johnson, Senior Analyst with ACG Research confirms: “SDN and NFV reshape conventional network designs and introduce the need for new management and service assurance tools to handle implementation.”

A recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) study on SDN and network virtualization’s impact on network management reveals even more evidence. Only 32% of communication service providers and enterprises feel confident that their performance management and troubleshooting tools are ready to support SDN and NFV technologies. That leaves a lot of organizations out there unprepared to meet the demands of this next-generation technology that will fuel their network transformations.


To succeed and win in the Application Economy and meet the demands of digital consumers, next-generation service assurance solutions will need to encompass:

■ Automated workflows

■ Physical and virtual network stack visibility

■ Service chain frameworks and metadata

■ Transient data collection

■ Actionable analytics

“A major threat to SDN and NFV success looms. Before SDN can help companies boost productivity and grow revenue, IT organizations must make sure they have the right network management tools in place”, says Shamus McGillicuddy, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

Accelerate the DevOps Vision

By prioritizing service assurance alongside network transformation, organizations will also be able to bring greater agility to their development activities. For example, with service assured SDN and NFV, internal and external developers will be able to test new or young applications on live networks, enabling a faster time-to-market and a better user experience.

The ability to meet production and development demands without compromising agility or availability will help organizations move closer to realizing the full vision of DevOps, which delivers significant advantage in a digital age.

With SDN and NFV set to become the backbone of the application economy, organizations need to ensure that next-generation network reliability is assured and optimized at every stage and every layer. Otherwise they risk being left behind in the slow lane. And you can bet digital consumers won’t stick around to enjoy the ride.

Jeremy Rossbach is Sr Product Marketing Manager at CA Technologies.

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SDN and NFV Can Help Safeguard Service Continuity and Quality in a Digital Age

Jeremy Rossbach

The application economy has put the digital consumer in the driving seat. They dictate when, where and how they want services delivered. Whether they are using a smartphone or a laptop, digital consumers all want one thing – speed. To be productive at work and play, they need to be in the fast lane, and so do businesses and their networks.

Building a network fit for the application economy means transformation, optimization and virtualization. Today’s networks and processes will not be sufficient to meet digital consumers’ expectations for agility and availability. Services will suffer downtime. Applications will be slow to respond. And digital consumers will be quick to find an alternative. Their expectations are high as recent research reveals that 80-90% of all consumer applications will only be used once.

Embracing new technologies, such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), will be key to safeguarding application performance and service continuity in a digital age.

However, organizations must invest and innovate with care. SDN and NFV are both disruptive technologies, which means they have the capacity to both enable and encumber application economy initiatives.

Catalyst for Change

When implementing SDN or NFV, businesses must plan not just for technological change but also operational and cultural change. Performance and fault management will no longer just be about fixing individual issues, but optimizing an overall service to enrich the experience for digital consumers.

To take a more holistic, user-focused approach to performance and fault management, CIOs will need to encourage greater collaboration between teams as well as embed service assurance into their SDN and NFV environments.

As Paul Parker-Johnson, Senior Analyst with ACG Research confirms: “SDN and NFV reshape conventional network designs and introduce the need for new management and service assurance tools to handle implementation.”

A recent Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) study on SDN and network virtualization’s impact on network management reveals even more evidence. Only 32% of communication service providers and enterprises feel confident that their performance management and troubleshooting tools are ready to support SDN and NFV technologies. That leaves a lot of organizations out there unprepared to meet the demands of this next-generation technology that will fuel their network transformations.


To succeed and win in the Application Economy and meet the demands of digital consumers, next-generation service assurance solutions will need to encompass:

■ Automated workflows

■ Physical and virtual network stack visibility

■ Service chain frameworks and metadata

■ Transient data collection

■ Actionable analytics

“A major threat to SDN and NFV success looms. Before SDN can help companies boost productivity and grow revenue, IT organizations must make sure they have the right network management tools in place”, says Shamus McGillicuddy, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

Accelerate the DevOps Vision

By prioritizing service assurance alongside network transformation, organizations will also be able to bring greater agility to their development activities. For example, with service assured SDN and NFV, internal and external developers will be able to test new or young applications on live networks, enabling a faster time-to-market and a better user experience.

The ability to meet production and development demands without compromising agility or availability will help organizations move closer to realizing the full vision of DevOps, which delivers significant advantage in a digital age.

With SDN and NFV set to become the backbone of the application economy, organizations need to ensure that next-generation network reliability is assured and optimized at every stage and every layer. Otherwise they risk being left behind in the slow lane. And you can bet digital consumers won’t stick around to enjoy the ride.

Jeremy Rossbach is Sr Product Marketing Manager at CA Technologies.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...