CLOUD AND CYBER
WRITTEN BY:
WILLIAM SMITHEven before the pandemic struck, factors such as hybrid
cloud meant network management was becoming an
ever more complicated affair. We take a closer look.N
etworks are taken as a given in the
modern world. We expect unbroken
connectivity and security, but it’s
not often we think about the network
management that makes that possible.
Digital networks themselves are a
surprisingly recent development. Packet
switching technology, which allows data
to be sent in chunks rather than as an
unwieldy unbroken string, was first
demonstrated only fifty years ago at
London’s National Physical Laboratory.
Other landmarks are more familiar to
us — the World Wide Web in 1990 being
the most prominent.
Networks are still very much in flux.
In the business space, one of the major
trends in recent times has been software-
defined wide area networking, or SD-WAN.
Put simply, the practice is an evolution of
traditional wide area networking, which
was intended to allow employees access
to servers hosted in an enterprise’s data
centre. Clearly, times have changed and
that approach is becoming rarer every day.How networks
a r e keeping pace
with digital
transformation
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