How software-defined infrastructure is shaping IT deployment

The face of IT deployments has changed tremendously over the last decade. While there was a time when even a relatively small IT deployment can easily take months or weeks of intense planning and setting up, the same systems are expected to be rolled out in days or even hours today. At the heart of this transition are new technological developments that have irrevocably changed the way IT systems are conceptualised and deployed.

A key aspect of this transformation could undoubtedly be attributed to the cloud, which allows services and on-demand compute to be purchased at the click of a mouse. Moreover, this cloud trend is not showing signs of plateauing but is in fact accelerating. According to analyst firm Gartner, public cloud revenue is predicted1 to grow 21.4 percent this year to a total of US$186.4 billion, driven by a mix of cloud-powered infrastructure, platform and software as-a-service.

And no wonder, as the cloud lets enterprises rapidly roll out the services they need to power their digital initiatives without hefty capital investments or lengthy lead time to set up their own infrastructure. Enterprises can instead focus on their core business competencies and on improving aspects of their organisations that the most likely to impact the bottom-line.

Enterprises are also turning to a mix of cloud platforms and services, as they seek to address concerns such as cloud lock-in, deploy new systems with minimum effort, get services up in the shortest amount of time, and attain maximum cost-effectiveness. Given the fact that not all workloads2 are suited to the cloud, this means that multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments are set to be the norm rather than the exception.

But while the cloud is typically credited with the lion’s share of credit, it is but a precursor to a larger paradigm shift that is seeing software-defined developments change the flexibility and speed of IT deployments. At the forefront would probably be software-defined networking (SDN), which was designed to abstract computer networks and make network devices programmable.

SDN separates the management of the control plane from the underlying data plane through which network traffic travels, resulting in increased flexibility in network management and the ability to implement fine-grained security policies. Network policies can hence be configured and pushed out from a central console without the need for painful rewiring of physical links or manual reconfiguration of individual routers.

Other software-defined technologies are afoot too, such as the software-defined data centre (SDDC). Typically used to describe how various data centre services can be pooled and managed via software to enable self-service IT and automation, colocation providers have since amalgamated SDDC with advanced DCIM to offer deep insights into the data centre. This ranges from real-time information of power and cooling status, to the monitoring of systems that enterprises can leverage to improve operational efficiency.

Together with the cloud, the rise of software-defined control is heralding a new generation of IT deployments that offers an even greater level of flexibility than before. Armed with the ability to deploy hundreds or thousands of server instances in the public cloud with the click of a mouse, or the ability to re-partition or merge clusters of compute resources within their private cloud on-the-fly, enterprises never had greater agility.

One final barrier would be cloud and data centre connectivity, which is offered by Singtel’s SD Connect. With private links between key cloud platforms and seamless interconnectivity to more than a dozen data centres, bandwidth can be securely provisioned, managed and adjusted from an intuitive web portal. This delivers genuine software-defined connectivity to undergird multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.

To take full advantage of the software-defined future, enterprises must not just adopt the right software-defined services but learn to embrace the flexibility and real-time control that these capabilities empower them with. They need to apply a fresh perspective to development, testing, service provisioning and scaling. Traditional 18-month development cycles must be replaced with a more agile approach, while new processes that enable automatic fault isolation and recovery must be developed.

The transition will not be an overnight process, but with the right mindset and determination, organisations can surely reinvent themselves to pull ahead of their competitors.

To learn more about how Singtel can help you with your software-defined journey, click here.

1 https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3871416

2 https://www.techrepublic.com/article/cloud-computing-well-never-be-all-in-say-most-companies/