Skip to main content

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

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

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

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...