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CATERING TO THE CHANGING APP LANDSCAPE
Ahmed El Saadi, Regional Sales Director / METNA & SSA, Virtual Cloud Network & Security at VMware discusses the changes in networking as deperimeterization becomes a reality
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t can be hard to bring the topic of networking into conversations at board level. In many ways, networking is a victim of its own success - if networks are performing well, then they struggle to attract any attention – they just work transparently. Yet in the context of business-critical modern apps, networking is critical. These apps, and their supporting microservices, are becoming increasingly disparate and data hungry. And networks are becoming an integral part of them, acting as a mesh-like conduit tying everything together and delivering digital experiences to end users.
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As workforces become increasingly distributed, and our reliance on modern apps, clouds and new devices increases, organisations need to recognise the expanding role that a modern, transformed network plays in facilitating modern business IT and ensuring end user satisfaction.
NETWORKING IN THE CONTEXT OF BUSINESS-WINNING MODERN APPS AND DATA
Apps and their users are increasingly data hungry, and the nature of this data, and where it lives, has changed. Data is now
CXO DX / DECEMBER 2020
much more disparate, spread from data centre to edge to endpoints, and everywhere in between. It’s also growing, and fast. By 2024 more than three quarters of a billion applications will exist – a six-fold increase in just ten years. The very nature of apps themselves is also changing rapidly. Traditional apps were monolithic slabs of code, usually existing on a single server. In this scenario, the network’s main role was one of point-topoint connectivity. Modern, cloud-native apps are very different, however. They are made up of a series of small individual
