Software-Defined Networking (SDN): Increase
Service Levels Without Increasing Costs
By Dan Kent, Chief Technology Officer for Cisco U.S. Public Sector Team
Federal government agencies now have a new, budget-friendly way to sustain and increase IT service levels. It’s called SDN, for
software-defined networking.
Here’s why SDN is important. When government networks carried data only, such as email and office applications, network
devices could treat all traffic the same way. But today, agency networks carry diverse kinds of traffic, including voice, video from
telepresence systems, surveillance video, traffic from various sensors, mission-critical application data, and more. To meet these
applications’ requirements, the network needs to treat different types of traffic in different ways—for example, by encrypting
sensitive information, or reserving bandwidth for critical telepresence sessions.
SDN meets this new need by enabling applications to program network devices based on multiple attributes, including time of
day, current network conditions, and security requirements.
Some Ways to Take Advantage of SDN in Government
Of the many ideas for using SDN to cut government costs or improve services, here a few of the most popular:
• Protecting sensitive information: Selectively encrypting traffic from certain applications is particularly useful in Department of
Defense and certain civilian federal government agencies. It is a requirement for multitenant cloud architectures.
• “Slicing” the network to cordon off specific traffic types: This use case is popular in higher education, where certain types
of traffic require special treatment. Examples include traffic destined to or from medical facilities; student services delivered
to personal devices; big-data analytics for researchers; videoconferencing for learning or administration; and payment-card
processing at events. Network slicing eliminates the need for a research network infrastructure.
• Improving network economics: Operational costs decrease when the IT team can make configuration changes in one place,
a centralized controller, instead of individually configuring each network device. SDN also allows network devices to consider
dollar cost in addition to speed when dynamically selecting a network path, which can significantly cut international traffic
costs.
• Responding efficiently to cyber threats: SDN can increase security by giving IT personnel visibility into real-time network
activity, and by automating defensive actions to minimize the impact. Today, for example, if a network detects that a laptop
is sending malware or attacking another system, it prevents further damage by blocking all traffic to and from that laptop.
With SDN, you can program the network to selectively block specific traffic based on attributes such as device address or
application, among others.
Network Programmability: Beyond SDN
SDN is just one approach to network programmability. Recognizing that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, Cisco has
introduced the Cisco® Open Network Environment (ONE), which provides multiple ways for applications to program the network.
These include SDN controllers and protocols, open application programming interfaces (APIs) for network devices, and virtual
overlay networks. Cisco is also one of the founding partners of OpenDaylight, a collaborative open source project to advance
SDN.
To learn more about the Cisco ONE strategy, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/one
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