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.
Disclaimer: The views presented are only personal opinions and they do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Government.
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