There’s been a lot of attention focused lately on the benefits of moving to a software defined networking (SDN) environment. Of course, as with any evolution, making the shift rarely happens overnight, and there are a few real challenges. Probably the biggest challenge is cultural. Simply put, SDN is a completely different way of doing things including sometimes monumental changes in the roles and responsibilities for key staff.

As SDN continues to gain prominence, fewer people will be actively involved with traditional configurations – meaning there are less people sitting at a keyboard doing manual command line interface configurations of switches or routers every time you want to provision, change or resize some part of the IT infrastructure. However, the ability to effectively orchestrate applications and network behavior to align with business priorities will become the art IT folks will need to master.

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As Software-Defined Networking (SDN) evolves, its promise is clear: agility. Enterprises and communication service providers alike have been able to significantly accelerate the time to deliver new applications and services as a direct result of software-defined technology.

From an infrastructure monitoring perspective, it also makes correlation of performance events easier. In fact, I recently spoke with Hussein Khazaal from Nuage Networks about this very topic: “With SDN, because the application is network-aware, that correlation [of performance issues] is automatically done,” says Hussein. “If your page refresh is taking too long, you can immediately correlate that to a specific part of the network. And because it’s programmable, you can develop tools to automatically re-route around those problems.”

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