What drives SDN adoption?
U.S. enterprises are looking to software-defined networking (SDN) providers to help them increase their agility and flexibility and enable remote working after the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report published by Information Services Group (ISG). The report finds U.S. enterprises embracing SDN and related technologies to increase their competitiveness, improve employee collaboration and deliver better mobile services to customers. U.S. enterprises are looking at ways they can achieve flexibility, speed and additional collaboration to deliver benefits to themselves and their ever-more-mobile customers and users, said Dieter Thompson, president, ISG Networking Solutions. Enterprise agility goes far beyond traditional network capabilities, and SDN can help companies adapt to a constantly changing business environment.  Meeting business and user needs  SDN technologies should be deployed along with cloud services, intelligent edge and mobility strategies and other technologies such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, the report recommends. The report sees increased network flexibility and agility as one of the driving factors in SDN adoption among U.S. enterprises. They are increasingly focused on using SDN technologies to improve the integration, automation, orchestration and management of network resources and processes. Enterprises want to seamlessly add applications and network resources to meet business and user needs. In addition, U.S. enterprises see SDN-related technologies as a way to migrate their IT and network operations to the cloud, the report says. Software-defined networks can assist with the move by reducing complexity and mitigating risk. Moving to SDN technologies also helps improve network security by enabling security-as-a-service and enhanced do-it-yourself security services, the report says. SDN will also enable enterprises to deploy integrated secure enterprise networks in the near future. SDN adoption can improve network usage efficiency  SDN technologies also can help enterprises improve network usage efficiency while reducing usage costs, the report notes. This is particularly helpful as enterprises are seeing an explosion of data usage from mobile devices, often in areas that are not business critical. This traffic can be routed over lower-cost connections at reduced reliability and quality levels. SDN can also increase customer satisfaction and boost sales, the report says. U.S. enterprises are using SDN to respond quickly and seamlessly to customer requests and rapidly provide new services, often through automate provisioning. In addition, many U.S. enterprises see SDN technologies as a key step toward adoption of new technologies such as intent-based networks, artificial intelligence, rapid hot spot provisioning, and self-healing networks, the report says. Many new technologies require the flexibility of software-defined networks to be used to their full potential. To realize the full benefits of SDN, many organizations need to not only adopt new technologies, but also transform their processes and management practices, the report notes. Many providers can help enterprises with this change in business processes.