Changes to the Internet in 2018

There are already many articles in the industry predicting how technology will develop and how the industry will change in 2018. More predictive articles will not be helpful to the development of the industry. This article will explain the major changes that will occur in the network in 2018 based on the technological trends that have already emerged.

SD-WAN

If there is no clear goal, it is best not to get involved in SD-WAN. Does the enterprise want to reduce MPLS costs? Or do you want to control remote branches in a zero-touch manner and reduce deployment and maintenance costs? It is very important to understand what changes SD-WAN can bring to the enterprise's wide area network, followed by choosing the right manufacturer and the right architecture.

There are many products in the industry that can provide some type of hybrid WAN, which can effectively reduce bandwidth costs, but not all products can easily implement remote deployment, service chaining or application-based traffic steering.

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Network Automation

In a recent ESG survey of network industry practitioners, the question "What best represents your organization's software-defined network?" Automation and programmability were the two most popular choices, followed by the use of controllers or network overlays. Although enterprises are slow to implement SDN, automation is one of the faster aspects, and network professionals should be prepared for it.

For some people, accepting network automation may require mastering to write an automated script in Python, or using intent-based network tools, etc. For others, it may be learning to use a manual network controller or a system that automatically applies network policies. To this end, network practitioners need to clarify why enterprises adopt SDN and understand which type of automation makes more sense for enterprise networks.

Network and Cloud

Understand how cloud computing affects the network. Cloud computing is rapidly changing IT infrastructure, and many IT organizations are struggling to keep up with the pace of cloud computing. You need to understand how to manage traffic between local data centers and the cloud, between clouds, or between clouds and other SaaS services. If you need to achieve low latency between data center workloads and public clouds, you may need to re-architect your network or use direct connections to cloud providers.

The major cloud providers and third-party providers offer a wide range of services with varying degrees of performance, egress costs, security, and ease of management. SD-WAN can help branch offices connect to the cloud, as well as how branch routers route traffic.

Network visualization in the cloud

IT professionals are accustomed to gaining workload and network visibility locally by deploying devices to report traffic performance. Public clouds make visibility more complicated as IT organizations rely on the hardware and software infrastructure of cloud service providers. But this does not mean that users must rely entirely on cloud service providers' performance reports. Tools designed to provide cloud network visibility have already appeared in the market, providing some familiar management and reporting functions.