VIEWPOINT
BREAKING OUT OF LEGACY MAKING THE MODERN NETWORK FOR NEXT GENERATION APPLICATIONS IS A MUST FOR THE BOARD, SAYS AHMED EL SAADI, REGIONAL SALES DIRECTOR / METNA & SSA, VIRTUAL CLOUD NETWORK & SECURITY AT VMWARE
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here’s a saying in football that you never notice a good referee. Yet they have the most important job – ensuring the match runs as smoothly as possible. Without a referee to police the action, countless games would descend into chaos. The same principle applies to the IT network. Its traditional role is to direct and deliver data smoothly and quickly, from data centre to cloud to edge to device, transparently and efficiently. And just like the referee in a football match, its power and importance can’t be overstated. In the boardroom however, it can be a hard sell to talk specifically about networking. But, in the today’s business world, it simply isn’t possible to run modern, cloud-native apps and get them (and the burgeoning volume of data they consume) into the hands of users without the right network. By extension, networks are critical to enabling employees to work anywhere, and improving customer experience – and thus improving revenue and competitiveness. In that 40
CXO INSIGHT ME
MARCH 2021
light, it becomes abundantly clear that networking deserves pride of place on the board agenda. With an increasingly disparate and distributed workforce, and our reliance on modern apps, clouds and new devices, organisations need to recognise the incremental value that a modernised network delivers. A modern network is delivered in software and is self-driving, self-provisioning, self-healing, intrinsically secure, and above all, scalable. But how and why has networking evolved to this point, in its efforts to facilitate modern business IT? Networking in the context of businesswinning modern apps and data There are two key agents of change driving network transformation, the first being the end user. Users are increasingly data hungry, and expect an ever-richer experience, meaning apps need to deliver data in larger volumes, to more places, on more devices, more often, and in a more consumable, user-friendly format. The nature of all this data, and where
it lives, has changed radically over the past few years. Data is now everywhere, existing anywhere from data centre, to the edge, to endpoints, and everywhere in between – creating distributed ‘centers of data’ rather than traditional data centers. Overall, IDC predicts that between 2019 and 2025, the amount of new data that is captured, created, and replicated every year will grow at a 61% compound growth rate. The second key agent of change in network transformation are applications the primary modern vehicle for delivering data and experiences to end users. By 2024 there will be more than three quarters of a billion applications – a sixfold increase in just ten years. This is huge. Just like consumers in any other walk of life, users want these new apps delivered faster and faster as their needs change. Developers, therefore, need to develop new apps fast. They need a network that supports this new rapid development process and that seamlessly and automatically scales with the needs of new applications. It’s becoming
