New Networking Requirements Driven By Internet of Things and Big Data

As data is created in greater amounts – and inevitably transferred between resources – the network must become increasingly powerful, flexible and agile in order to keep up with application demands.

The Internet of Things is leading to an explosion in the data available to make faster and better-informed business decisions. The key to exploiting this data for business benefit is accessing it on demand and rapidly analyzing it to deliver value. This requires massive volumes of data be moved across the infrastructure, from distributed locations of rest, to locations of analysis. Many networks, however, are fragile, outdated and unprepared for that level of stress. This means it’s time for the network to undergo its own transformation to meet these data transport needs.

We’ve outlined five different characteristics below.

Scalability. In a dynamic data and application environment where data volumes are exploding, it’s about more than just scaling up. The challenge with scalability now is really about how to scale out. Modern applications and data analytics grow through the addition of parallel processing and storage. Traditional scale up was about replacing outgrown processing and storage capacity with bigger boxes and migrating data onto the new platform. Now, as the environment grows, more physical devices are connected to the network in parallel. It’s about more than just adding capacity through bigger pipes; now it’s about supporting a rapidly growing number of storage and compute nodes.

Integration. Network infrastructure must work in an orchestrated fashion to deliver application experience. This means that compute, storage, networking, applications and all the surrounding systems must be capable of frictionless coordination. The traditional walls that have existed between these domains need to be torn down. A well-integrated network should be able to affect different behaviors via policy and have the ability to efficiently fit available network resources to the most critical business needs.

Security. As organizations begin to implement big data and demand robust and agile networks, security and data protection is more important than ever. The ability to, in real time, identify, isolate and send at risk traffic across the network to depth in defense technologies like intrusion prevention and next generation firewalls will be paramount.

Resiliency. Distributed systems function properly when interconnection is reliable. This means the network must be fault-tolerant and resilient. What is needed for next generation resiliency is an elastic pool of network resources capable of efficiently utilizing all of the existing capacity. The goal is to build a dynamic network with real-time data and application awareness to fully support workload requirements.

Agility. Data and application agility is meaningless if the network cannot keep pace. And keeping pace means removing complexity, simplifying operations and embracing automation to provide a dynamic and responsive infrastructure