An IDC (News - Alert) Financial Insight report released in October 2013 revealed IT spending in the banking, capital markets, and insurance industries will top $430 billion this year. Banks will account for $215 billion, capital markets will invest $110 billion and insurance companies will add another $100 billion around the globe. As the world continues to migrate from cash to digital commerce, financial institutions have to ensure their entire IT infrastructure is able to withstand the growth that is foreseen in the coming decade and the security threats it will face from an increasingly sophisticated global criminal enterprise.
In a recent Computerworld story titled, "Bank of America sees software-defined data centers as 'irresistible'," writer Patrick Thibodeau highlights why BoA has chosen to migrate to this technology and why it sees virtualizing almost all of its IT, from the data center to the desktop as its future.
Software defined networking, or SDN, has fundamentally changed the way networks are built, provisioned and managed. By introducing programmability into networking, IT departments and data centers around the world now have better control on how they can manage their digital domain. Even though SDN data centers are not fully realized yet, the promise of the technology has given CIOs a more optimistic look of the future of data center operations.
With SDN, data centers will be able to have 20 or more virtual machines running inside of each physical server with its own network requirements. The addition of cloud technology also adds a layer of complexity by allowing automated provisioning of virtual machines to create an environment that is more flexible, scalable and dynamic.
With this technology, network connections can be set up in minutes, allowing network administrators to make changes to a software interface with speed and efficiency. This creates a more dynamic data center in which customers will be able to reroute their server loads between actual data centers and racks.
For corporate networks, SDN will unify corporate computer resources under a single domain while offering more flexibility than ever, so resources can be deployed no matter where they are located around the world.
Whether it is the financial industry or any other corporation with a large IT presence, SDN will allow organizations to adapt to their environments to meet the needs of their customers, the organization or regulatory compliance with ease.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson