Everything becomes a Service. Looking at the Infrastructure (IaaS) level, Virtual Machines and Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN’s) were about the first resources that came available through hosting en cloud offerings. Other network devices such as firewalls, routers and load balancers followed. Software Defined Networking and Datacenter are nowadays the way to go.
What does this mean for enterprise networking and WAN-connectivity? One trend that might occur in the future is the potential death of the Wide Area Network (WAN) as we know it.
WANs typically handle many-to-many connectivity, with a number of backbone networks connecting large business centres together with smaller network offshoots connecting local offices and regional branches.
The data centre is evolving into a connectivity hub where all of the above aspects come together: general computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), security, public cloud solutions and other IT services. The data centres themselves will become increasingly virtualised and develop into an integrated, location-independent vendor-based environment.
As enterprises look to deploy all their IT resources to the data centre, all a business will need is appropriate connectivity to the closest data centre. Over time this will reduce network complexity and significantly ease the workload of the IT manager.
