Sometimes it’s hard to see gradual changes in technology paradigms because they’re gradual. Sometimes it helps to play “Just suppose…” and see where it leads. So, just suppose that the cloud did what some radical thinkers say, and “absorbed the network”. That’s sure an exciting tag line, but is this even possible, and how might it come about?
Companies are already committed to a virtual form of networking for their WAN services, based on VPNs or SD-WAN, rather than building their own WANs from pipes and routers. That was a big step, so what could be happening to make WANs even more virtual, to the point where the cloud could subsume them? It would have to be a data-center change.
The largest component of enterprise network spending is the data center, and in fact enterprises have been telling me for 30 years that data-center networking sets their overall network requirements. The view that the cloud will absorb the network arises from the presumption that the cloud will absorb the data center.
In this cloud-centric vision of the future, every site would be connected to the cloud and each other using the internet, just as homes, small businesses, and smaller SD-WAN sites are already. There wouldn’t need to be any other service like MPLS VPNs because you can get to the cloud from the internet. You’d access the internet at each site using what’s now described as a secure access service edge or SASE. You could have little SASEs for small locations, giant SASEs where there were a lot of people gathered to use their now-in-the-cloud applications. The SASE’s goal would be to create what looked like a “company network”, just as SD-WAN already does, and to make all the complexity of networking as we know it invisible.
While a lot of CFOs and line executives might love the idea of eliminating data centers, I’ve yet to find an enterprise with a serious strategy to move everything to the cloud. In fact, there are more enterprises trying to figure out how to modernize legacy core applications that stay in the data center than are trying to cloudify everything. Security and compliance concerns, reliability/availability, and cost management are all issues enterprise planners tell me are likely to keep their data centers rolling, maybe forever.
Even if you believe the cloud will eat all of IT application hosting, that doesn’t eliminate everything but those SASEs. An office is a bit like a home network. Where there are only a few employees, maybe up to a hundred, you can build the local connectivity using nothing more than an internet gateway with Wi-Fi and Ethernet, maybe some repeaters, and maybe a few dumb LAN switches. As your employee count rises, those simple dumb LAN switches spread like weeds, and the cascading of traffic that daisy-chaining them to create connectivity start to load down the switches closest to the internet gateway. We need a hierarchy of switches, backbone and edge, to form a true local network.
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