Software Defined Network (SDN) is being labelled as the future of networking for its ability to deliver greater efficiency and automation.However, research from British cloud and network provider, Exponential-e, has revealed that 86% of businesses do not understand SDN and 95% do not know what benefits it could bring to their enterprise.

“In an innovate-or-fail society, an agile and responsive network is central to driving competitive advantage,” explained Chris Christou, director of Engineering at Exponential-e. “Providing a business with the ability to manage and control their network themselves enables them to support their business internally in their drive for increased revenues.”

SDN effectively allows organisations to reconfigure network services on-demand. Enterprises are no longer subject to change controls, service tickets or related support and management fees. Instead they can adapt the services that network providers deliver, through a simple self-service interface.

Given the IT difficulties being faced by businesses in 2016, more organisations need to take advantage of SDN to eliminate the bottleneck of human intervention and provide a central system to manage the services required, and monitor the associated activity. In total, nearly a third (32%) of respondents are battling escalating software and hardware costs, 21% admitted that there is a lack of internal control over the network and 17% said that infrastructure was unable to cope with growth.

Chris Christou, Director of Engineering, Exponential-e

“SDN increases efficiency and supports the flexibility demanded by fast moving organisations that are tasked with responding to unexpected outages and breaks in service. Using the database as a master A-Z then it’s possible to map the optimum route to instantly reconfigure networks, reduce latency and meet peaks or troughs in demand,” concluded Christou. “SDN effectively removes the impenetrable barrier between a customer and network provider, providing a more flexible and agile way to manage network configurations.”

Exponential-e’s product portfolio includes services for cloud & IT, Voice, Networking, Data Centres and Professional Services. Its cloud services do not traverse the public internet. Instead, they reside (logically, says the company) on a customer’s LAN, on the clean side of the firewall so security and privacy concerns are negated. Exponential-e wholly owns a superfast 100 Gigabit Ethernet Layer 2 VPLS Network that is said to guarantee a superior level of resilience, reliability and performance. Exponential-e also integrates with third party providers and bespoke applications for both the Enterprise and small to medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) with an end-to-end service level agreement.

Exponential-e surveyed 100 UK business and IT leaders online from the January 5-9, 2016.

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