Executive summary
Over the past decade, the cloud has become integral to nearly every digital and business transformation strategy, allowing clients to access
the latest technologies, such as IoT, high-performance computing, and blockchain from multiple vendors to reimagine business processes
and ecosystems.
However, the network and the inter-connectivity across physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, and “as-a-service” ingestion points hinder or block broad cloud adoption across the enterprise. Traditional networking approaches make it difficult to keep pace with change and take advantage of new and differentiating technology.
Today’s leading network service providers are virtualizing the network, separating the proprietary network appliance functions into discrete hardware and software components. This enables networks to achieve the same benefits already realized with the virtualization and software-defined enablement of systems and storage. The virtualization of the network is recognized as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Virtualized Network Functions (VNF).