Imagine taking 1.6 years to complete a network upgrade across 400 branches, at a relatively aggressive pace of one site installation every business day. Then imagine being able to complete the same project within four months, at a fraction of the effort and deployment cost.
The difference is stark, and to explain it we need to understand how software is changing the status quo in networking and security.
Today, as businesses expand and branch offices proliferate at digital speed, the traditional approach to WAN build-out and branch network deployment is hitting the wall. The pace of change makes it less and less tenable for enterprises to deploy and manage separate networking and security hardware stacks at each branch office. The process is costly and time-consuming, and the resulting configuration becomes increasingly complex as branch requirements grow, making it extremely difficult to manage and scale.
The software-defined paradigm addresses these challenges by abstracting key network and security functions from specialised appliances through network functions virtualisation (NFV) and consolidating the virtualised software instances (virtualised network functions or VNFs) onto a multiservice software platform. The software runs on a universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) which can be deployed on-premise to address performance and latency issues.
This specific application of software-defined technology provides a suite of fully-managed VNFs that helps enterprises to simplify their network infrastructure and lower their capital investments for branch and WAN by consolidating multiple networks onto this single uCPE.
Some providers offer managed services such as Virtual Router (vRouter) which performs the network routing function; and Virtual Security (vSecurity) which includes next-generation firewalls, URL filtering, anti-virus and intrusion prevention systems. It offers centralised management of the VNFs, which are policy orchestrated with zero-touch provisioning to simplify network and security rollout. Finally, an NFV analytics portal will provide enterprises with self-service analytics and reporting for better real-time and historical visibility.
These infrastructure services offer investment protection by enabling enterprises to scale bandwidth without having to deploy new hardware. Different security functions can also be service-chained to achieve multi-layered security and deliver defence in depth, protecting users across different devices and networks. These security services can be spun up in a matter of days to protect mission-critical data, instead of the weeks or even months that it could take to deploy or upgrade a security appliance.
Coming back to the network transformation involving 400 branch offices, the reason behind the dramatic reduction in time-to-deployment now becomes clear. Instead of having to purchase specialised routers and firewall appliances, ship them to each site and schedule integrators to install, integrate and test the equipment, the software-defined approach enables service providers to ship commodity white box appliances to an estimated 100 branches a month, and remotely activate and test 25 devices simultaneously per week.
1.6 years to 4 months is a whopping 80% reduction in time, and that is just a hint of what is possible with the seismic shift to software-defined infrastructure.
You can read up more about software-defined network services, as well as how it helps retailers cope with the network challenges unique to their industry in this whitepaper: “A modern networking infrastructure unleashes innovations in retail operation and customer service”.
