The federal government agencies are facing an increasingly tight budget for
both their current fiscal year and the foreseeable years to come. In the
current political environment, it is paramount for the government agencies to
find new innovative ways and means to accomplish the agencies’ missions with increasingly less funding and fewer resources.
Nowadays, we are confronted daily by new waves of technological innovations
and digital revolution, such as
M2M, Internet of
Things (
IoT),
and Software-Defined Everything (
SDX),
one of which, the hot buzz of the day, Software-Defined Networking (
SDN), will
not only provide tremendous cost-savings in the short-run, but also enable the
agencies to transform their existing network infrastructure and computing
architectures to operate more efficiently and effectively in a long run. Here
are the reasons why:
By definition, SDN will introduce a vendor-neutral and open platform for the
enterprise network infrastructure and data centers alike, which, in turn, will
be able to provide an equal playing field for all vendors, big or small, to
have the opportunity to compete for the government IT infrastructure procurements
and contracts, as long as they are in compliance with the new SDN standards
such as the
OpenFlow
protocol for their networking products.
By introducing a competitive multi-vendor networking environment in the
government agencies, the SDN will dramatically lower the cost as compared to
the single vendor networking environment, which is very common nowadays in many
federal government agencies. According to a most recent online survey of 300
federal network managers conducted in February 2014 by MeriTalk, the network
infrastructure diversification by way of multi-vendors competition, which will
ultimately lead to
50% additional
savings for the agencies’ IT acquisitions, service, and maintenance costs.
Furthermore, by aggressively adopting the cost-saving technology
initiatives, such as data center consolidation and virtualization, public and
private cloud computing solutions, multi-vendor network infrastructure
diversification, and software-defined Information Technology including the SDN,
software-defined data center (
SDDC),
software-defined storage (
SDS), etc.,
the federal government agencies will eventually be able to achieve major cost
savings and operational efficiencies, while at the same time being able to
carry out and fulfill their missions to serve the public in the current
challenging political and fiscal environments.
Obviously, adopting those innovative technology initiatives are huge
undertaking and change is always difficult, if not almost impossible, in many
government agencies. However, with the current budget constraints, the
choices are limited for many federal agencies. The decision makers need to be
able to enthusiastically embrace the SDX, including SDN, in order to remain
relevant in the current Software-Defined Information Technology revolution.
