Why would organizations need software-defined networking?

Any good enterprise networks should be built with the following goals in mind:

  • Performance
  • Scalability
  • Redundancy

The network, first and foremost, needs to be performant to meet customer needs. Customers can be end users in the data center or end users of the application in the public domain. With Continuous Delivery and deployment, if networking blocks a developer in a test environment, it is hampering a potential feature or bug fix reaching production, so it is not acceptable to have sub-standard pre-production networks and they should be designed as scaled-down functional replicas of production.

Scalability focuses on the ability to scale out the network to support company growth and demand. ...

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