Enterprise networks must become more agile

The overwhelming majority (92%) of enterprises feel that their network infrastructure is not agile enough to support next-generation applications and services, a new survey suggests.

The survey of 400 senior IT decision-makers from large UK and US enterprises, commissioned by Brocade, suggests that legacy networks are struggling to keep up with new demands.

More than a quarter of respondents reported having to take remedial action on network outages multiple times per week, if not daily, and one in five label their enterprise networks “not fit for purpose”.

The results indicate that legacy networks will need to evolve to keep up with data demands, according to Jason Nolet, Brocade vice president for data centre switching and routing.

“Over the last 10 years, the way we interact with data has evolved beyond anyone’s expectation. Billions of connected devices are overloading global networks ... Virtualisation and cloud models are scaling at pace but require greater network agility and performance,” he said.

“All of these factors are placing pressure on an infrastructure that, frankly, was never designed to deal with such demands.”

But he said the survey also shows that IT decision-makers are starting to tackle these pressures head on. More than half of respondents in the two markets are either already evaluating software-defined networking (SDN) technologies or plan to do so in the next 12 months.

Enterprises are currently also looking into re-engineering their networking environments to facilitate SDN, with 65% of respondents either actively using or evaluating moving to Ethernet fabric architectures.

Image courtesy of Alex Askew under CC