Taking a Unified Approach to Software Defined Networking (SDN) with Cisco ACI
The IT environments which businesses operate today are becoming increasingly complex. Managing modern, cloud and virtualized IT infrastructuresinvolves constantly changing requirements, adopting new software applications, balancing hybrid/multi-cloud architectures, supporting a variety of device types, thwarting security threats, not to mention mitigating issues with shadow IT – and the list goes on. When you consider all these factors, it’s not surprising that 66 percent of IT professionals say increasing IT complexity makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs.
As a means to combat some of this complexity, we’re seeing an massive shift towards software-defined networking (SDN) to support the virtualized server and storage infrastructure of the modern data center. For our non-technical readers, the goal of SDN is to allow network engineers and administrators to respond quickly to changing business requirements via a centralized control console. SDN encompasses multiple kinds of network technologies designed to make the network more flexible and agile to enable rapid resource provisioning of services and applications as new IT and business needs arise.
Navisite and Cisco Address Data Center Demands in the Cloud Era
To provide clients with a highly efficient underlying IT fabric that enables them to increase the pace of innovation, Navisite announcedthis week that it has deployed Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) as a core technology within its software defined data center strategy. Cisco ACI will provide the SDN foundation to automate our data centers worldwide and speed time-to-market for our clients, while at the same time enhancing security and compliance for our clients and the organization.
Delivering Large Enterprise Advantages to Mid-Market & Smaller Enterprise
With access to advanced SDN services, our mid-market and smaller enterprise clients can have the same advantages as larger organizations to grow and transform their businesses, while increasing competitive advantage.
With ACI, we’ll be able to offer new services tailored to our clients’ requirements, such as inserting a specific firewall or load balancer to meet their needs within Navisite’s managed private cloud hostingenvironments. In the future, clients will also be able to view and manage the capacity and performance within their environment and turn on additional services through Cisco ACI’s APIC Controller and Navisite’s client portal, Proximity.
Making Your Business “Cloud Ready”
As a managed cloud provider, our priority is to help our clientsharness the scalability and flexibility of their cloud infrastructure. Through partnerships like this, we continue to take the complexity out of managing cloud environments, while also freeing IT to focus on their jobs and strategic projects that drive business transformation.
Download this white paper, When is a Managed Cloud Provider Right for Your Business? 5 Smart Questions to Ask, to learn how working with a managed cloud provider can help reduce IT complexity and alleviate the burdens of monitoring and maintaining physical and virtual infrastructure.