With virtualisation ushering in a new generation of agile, smart and scalable networks, Colin Evans, senior director EMEA CoE, Juniper Networks, explained the business case for adopting NFV.
Navigating a changing world
Fuelled by new technologies and new thinking, market disruption has been relentless with the digital economy continuing to turn many business models on their head. Understanding how disruption is shaping the competitive environment isn’t just the latest challenge that many established service providers must face, it’s become critical for survival.
Although quick to embrace new business paradigms, traditional service providers are up against intense pressure from the next generation of ‘born-in-the-cloud’ start-ups and over-the-top (OTT) content players. In this increasingly cloud-driven and connected world, these content providers have been quick to position themselves in the vanguard of new technology solutions, transforming both service innovation and network economics.
Navigating a path through this competitive landscape is now a key priority. For example, creating a delivery model that involves automated fulfilment of on-demand services – enabling customers to choose, set up and operate their own service from an online portal – is a pre-requisite. And as customer demand expands, the service provider’s network needs to adapt, scale and evolve to respond to changing market conditions, dynamically and quickly.
Not all networks are equal
However, recognising how advances in IT infrastructure can support a new generation of services and content delivery is just the beginning. Being able to capitalise on the strategic value inherent within an intelligent, services-enabled platform is where things really start to get interesting. It’s about enabling an organisation to take a holistic view of network operations to drive insight, innovation and decisions.
Not all networks are made equal, however. Often built with overlapping generations of technology ‘sprawl’, adding layer upon layer of operational complexity, legacy networks typically end up constraining businesses with cumbersome operations, misaligned cost structures, inadequate and outdated security capability and a rigid infrastructure.
And with various reported estimates for the number of connected devices and ‘things’ predicting exponential growth, network systems that transport and store digital services are only set to become bigger, more pervasive, and increasingly complex. Service providers are going to need a new network strategy as data traffic, either from devices or other systems, continues to escalate, and lowering costs while increasing capacity, service delivery and service innovation, is just the beginning.
Virtualisation meets a business end
Traditionally, configuring or modifying network services required installing, commissioning and managing new physical hardware. Selecting, testing, integrating and securing each new device took time and infrastructure wasn’t easily scalable, hence the inevitable sprawl of legacy equipment which in turn needed to be manually updated and managed.
Meeting this challenge, Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) is an approach that uses software principles previously employed in IT systems to create virtualised instances of network functions.
The author of this blog is Colin Evans, Senior director EMEA CoE, Juniper Networks.
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