Hybrid and multi-cloud initiatives will continue to shape enterprise IT in 2023, with impacts on data center networks in key areas such as security, management and operations. Networking teams are investing in technologies like SD-WAN and SASE, expanding automation initiatives, and focusing on skills development as more workloads and applications span cloud environments.
“The most important core trend in data centers is the recognition that the hybrid cloud model—combining current transaction processing and database activity with cloud-hosted front-end elements for user interface—is the model that will dominate over time ,” said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. and Network World columnist. Nolle said the industry is witnessing a slow modernization of data center applications to support hybrid cloud models, “which includes greater componentization of those applications, greater horizontal traffic, and a greater need to manage security on-premises. The hosting of applications part.”
Thomas Scheibe, vice president of product management for Cisco Cloud Networking Group, said that as hybrid plans advance, organizations are developing new guidelines for which workloads can be moved to the public cloud and which need to be moved back on-premises.
“IT and enterprise finance organizations will be more focused on capturing the lifecycle costs of applications as more organizations grapple with growing bills from their cloud providers,” Scheibe said. “This will create more demand for multi-cloud networking and hybrid cloud solutions, providing companies with more choice and flexibility.”
Mike Bushong, vice president of cloud-ready data centers at Juniper Networks, said the appeal of “lift and shift” will start to wane. “Many companies move to the cloud on the assumption that it will be cheaper. They hire consulting firms or partners to help them enhance existing applications and move them to the cloud,” he said.
Hybrid cloud is the future, Bushong said, but he doesn’t want to see applications dynamically moved back and forth between on-premises and the cloud. “Apps that are not cloud native but are still needed will likely stay in place. New applications will be built with specific hosting locations in mind. They will essentially stay in place,” he said.
Still, “moving to the cloud will give these companies a taste of cloud operations that will be enough to trigger widespread adoption of cloud-like workflows and interfaces in on-premises infrastructure,” Bushong said.
In fact, experts say, it’s all about workflows and how best to handle them over the network.
“Traditional enterprises are not necessarily building new data centers anymore. But they are deploying data centers more and more,” said John Gray, director of data center marketing at Aruba. Data center customers are working with colocation providers and cloud service providers, attracted by the consumption models these providers can offer and the flexibility to choose performance levels based on different workloads and use cases, he said.
Security inside and outside the data center
Increased use of cloud services and colocation facilities has in turn fueled growth in the deployment of SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) technologies to protect access to these resources.
“Pushing customer/partner and employee access to applications through a cloud front-end means you need to push security and VPN ingress capabilities into the cloud, which means SASE/SD-WAN. This means SD-WAN will likely become more efficient than MPLS VPN More important,” said CIMI’s Nolle.
SASE, which integrates SD-WAN with a suite of security services, is capturing the attention of organizations that need to securely adapt to the ever-expanding edge that includes not only public clouds but also branch offices, remote workers, and IoT networks .
“Q3 2022 was the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year SASE revenue growth of more than 25%, demonstrating the importance enterprises place on SASE,” said Mauricio Sanchez, Director of Cybersecurity, SASE and SD-WAN Research, Dell Oro Group. “Unlike some of the other cybersecurity markets we track, we expect high investment priorities to continue and result in the SASE market exceeding $8 billion in 2023.”
Research firm Gartner expects a larger market – it estimates global SASE spending will reach $9.2 billion in 2023, a 39% increase from 2022.
“The adoption of cloud and edge computing and work-from-anywhere initiatives are fundamentally changing access requirements,” Gartner wrote in a recent report. “For most organizations, users, devices, applications are now outside the enterprise. , services, and data than on-premises. Attempting to use a traditional perimeter-based approach to secure anytime, anywhere access has resulted in a patchwork of vendors, policies, consoles, and complex traffic routing, creating complexity for security administrators and users .”
Security inside data centers is also changing. In particular, many businesses are considering the advantages of network fabric technology. Network structures typically use a mesh of connections between access points, switches, and routers to transport data to its destination.
“There is a lot more east-west traffic in data centers today, and fabric technology is in a unique position to be the single source of truth because all traffic is traversing that infrastructure at the access layer or leaf and spine. Many Customers like the idea of Fabric because it has the visibility to collect all data center telemetry data and use it for the specific security functions they need to monitor,” said Aruba’s Gray.
On the management side, enterprises can harden their hybrid environments and simplify security management through greater automation and abstraction.
“If security teams can implement tools that allow them to use a common framework to manage security across multiple clouds, they can mitigate the greatest risks of misconfiguration and operational errors,” Cisco said in its recent Global Hybrid Cloud Trends report.
Automation Key to Mixing Operations
Across the board, infrastructure automation is critical to operating at cloud scale and efficiency. In its research, Cisco found that 49% of organizations surveyed have deployed automation.
“This is an area that has traditionally been underinvested in. There are significant differences in the adoption of infrastructure automation compared to overall cloud usage. Among those organizations using only a single public cloud, 39% reported deploying automation. With more than 10 Operators of clouds report higher levels of automation deployment – 55%. This shows that automation is becoming a mandatory requirement to manage the growing complexity of hybrid clouds,” Cisco said.
“Tools that leverage automation—such as an IT operations platform as a cloud-based service delivery that supports infrastructure lifecycle management—can further help understand the complexities of hybrid cloud,” Cisco said.
Brad Casemore, research vice president of data center and multi-cloud networking at IDC, also emphasized the growing importance of automation.
“Cloud-based workloads in data centers and the broader enterprise are driving the demand and use of network automation,” Casemore said.
“We expect to see tremendous growth in usage of global cloud networks from AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle and others,” Casemore said. The industry also needs to improve how these networks interact: “Right now it’s like a ship sailing in the night, but that’s not going to be how most enterprises operate in a multi-cloud world,” Casemore said. “IT network operations will be looked at to bring order to a potentially chaotic situation.”
Intelligent network automation will help bring consistency and simplicity to networks across multiple clouds, Casemore said. The stakes are high. “I think network automation can be great—if it’s not done well, it’s an absolute disaster,” he said.
Skills are critical to success. Gartner predicted in a recent report that 60% of data center infrastructure teams will have relevant automation and cloud technologies by 2027, up from 30% in 2022.
Additionally, by 2023, AI/ML will begin to play an increasing role in network automation, albeit with limited use cases. “The most impactful use case will be AI/ML-enabled digital twins that become part of standard network operations processes for large enterprises,” Cisco’s Scheibe said.
Focus on network operations, skills
The way enterprise data center IT professionals deal with these network challenges will also change.
“The cloud and network operations teams will retain their separate team identities, but we will start to see some cracks in the walls that currently separate them. One important way for these teams to collaborate more closely is around common tools such as infrastructure automation and contextual data sharing, which will lead to organizational optimization,” Cisco’s Scheibe said. “This is an important step in moving major organizations toward service-centric infrastructure operations teams, but we are still several years away from an overhaul of IT teams.”
Gartner also describes the need for greater coordination between network operations teams and other IT disciplines.
In its 2023 Cloud, Data Center and Edge Infrastructure Planning Guide, Gartner describes an emerging service-centric network stack that consists of physical network infrastructure and higher-order services that will communicate over the network. The service connection layer between applications anchors the network.
“The basic network connectivity layer contains traditional network devices and structures such as IP address management, routing, DNS, load balancers and firewalls. The service connectivity layer adds a level of abstraction on top of the physical network,” Gartner said.
Therefore, according to Gartner, developers do not need to interface directly with the network, but only with the service connection layer.
“The service connectivity layer may be the responsibility of the network operations team or DevOps personnel, cloud engineering, or platform engineering. Regardless of who owns it, core networking experts need to ‘move up’ to coordinate with the builders of the service connectivity layer,” Gartner said.
Some other interesting data center networking trends include:
White box data center switching