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What does the future of networking in the cloud era look like?

Matthew Burbidge
By Matthew Burbidge
Johannesburg, 15 Sept 2016
March 14, 2006 was an important date in the technology industry, says Paul O'Farrell, Riverbed Technology.
March 14, 2006 was an important date in the technology industry, says Paul O'Farrell, Riverbed Technology.

IT professionals, analysts and Riverbed executives gathered in New York this week to discuss the topic, and there appeared to be broad agreement that cloud represented a force for change, both in transforming business practices and engaging with customers.

Paul O'Farrell, a senior vice president and general manager of the SteelHead and SteelFusion business at Riverbed Technology, says cloud-based systems - particularly hybrid environments - represent a challenge to IT professionals. These professionals are the ones responsible for the performance of applications, but are still working with outdated networks.

"It's almost as if enterprise networking got stuck in a time warp sometime around the mid-90s," he says, adding that today's network is a complex, insecure and unpredictable environment. Worse, IT professionals are expected to manage their network 'with a set of tools that belong not even to the early 2000s, but the 1990s'.

There is also the desire to use various types of Internet transport. "How do you explain to your CFO who lives somewhere where you can get Google fibre - 1gig for $7 a month - why you're playing thousands of dollars for T1 in a metro area?"

He says most network administrators' days were spent staring at a screen and managing individual devices rather than the system as a whole. "It's almost as if you got in a Tesla and instead of the nice high resolution screen there's a command line interface and a keyboard."

Intuitive network

March 14, 2006 was an important date in the technology industry, he says. That was the day Amazon Web services was launched.

"It turned on a whole new wave of innovation. What Amazon and more recently Azure, and the other providers of cloud services have done, have allowed IT professionals and organisations to be able to spin up servers, storage and applications in a matter of hours if not minutes. And you could do it all in multiple countries."

For O'Farrell, what's needed is a network that's intuitive, and much more software defined. This could be a simple, automated, policy-based way of 'masking the complexity of the enterprise network while allowing you to do all the things in terms of mixing and matching network transport'.

It's almost as if enterprise networking got stuck in a time warp sometime around the mid-90s.

Paul O'Farrell, Riverbed Technology

Hansang Bae, Riverbed CTO, says in his experience, customers are beginning to realise they can't bury their head in the sand any longer. "This whole 'slow and steady wins the race'-DNA in IT guys ... that ship has sailed."

He says nowadays, businesses finally have a choice to move to the cloud, whereas in the past, they always had to use what they were given.

"Now, with SaaS, you can just go, use a credit card, and get stuff done. It's not bad news. We're finally getting the weapons needed to do something about keeping up with the business."

He says other areas of IT, such as servers and firewalls, have long had the tools to effectively manage these areas of technology, but for some reason, "the priesthood of the infrastructure folks were left behind, and now it's catching up. It's scary, but refreshing at the same time".

Bae believes cloud is the 'forcing function' that breaks silos. "You can't get to the cloud by yourself. You can get to the Internet by yourself, but you're not bringing up servers and automation without security, without infrastructure to get you there. So cloud is forcing that to happen."

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