There is no question that network virtualization (NV) and SDN are gaining significant traction to help bring increased agility, speed, and simplicity to today’s network. The first area of focus has been the data center – and for good reason. Server virtualization and virtual machine (VM) mobility have ensured that the data center network can provide better flexibility and scale. And, as you can see in SDxCentral’s recent NV in the Data Center report, the effort to virtualize the data center network is well underway.

Emerging now is the software-defined WAN . SD-WAN is gaining a lot of momentum due to cost and complexity reasons. It offers the potential to reduce the number of expensive IP/MPLS links to interconnect branches (and move to less expensive broadband) and to reduce the manual configuration of WAN routers. And in this era of software-defined everything, it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing about the software-defined campus, the software-defined branch… and so forth.

So, where’s the problem? The problem is that the enterprise is end-to-end and should be looked at that way. When you get up in the morning, you don’t choose each piece of clothing in isolation. You put together a coordinated outfit based on what you have planned for the day. (We all know that networking professionals are a fashionable bunch!) I would like to argue that the same concept should apply to network design. Rather than looking at each area of the network independently, the network must be looked at in its entirety. This avoids the common issue of having discrete technology silos or islands and then needing to figure out how to interconnect them.

Enterprise-wide virtualization can offer significant benefits like having a single, contiguous service layer from application to endpoint. Consider why the network exists: It’s to make our users productive – so that they have seamless access to the applications that they need to perform their jobs more effectively from wherever they connect. Visibility into the end-to-end service has a tremendous impact on end-user Quality-of-service (QoS) since you can now clearly measure quality and performance and more effectively troubleshoot issues.

Enterprise-wide virtualization can also help organizations more effectively deal with the IoT phenomenon. Gartner research estimates that by 2020, 25 billion connected “things” will be in use. For hospitals, these devices might be Internet-connected heart rate monitors and medical sensors. For schools, they may be surveillance cameras or students’ mobile devices. Nearly every industry today relies on Internet-connected devices and will rely on them even more in the future. With the right end-to-end architecture, in addition to automating the secure attachment of virtual machines in the data center or automating the configuration of a WAN router, you can extend this concept to anything that connects to your network – whether it’s a user or a thing – creating on-demand elastic services from device to data center.

A consistent, enterprise-wide virtualization strategy can also help improve security. Current data center focused architectures are starting to support micro-segmentation where secure zones can be set up within the data center so that critical information (like healthcare records or credit card transactions) can be isolated down to the VM level. If the data center does happen to be compromised the threat is isolated and doesn’t propagate. The challenge is that such a segmented environment doesn’t extend to the entry point of the network, so it is not as effective in securing the network as it could be. With enterprise-wide virtualization, you can extend micro-segmentation to the user/endpoint, ensuring that sensitive information is isolated end-to end.