2015 IT priorities: SDN yet to prove itself, fear of network hacks growing

Software-defined networking (SDN) is all the rage among suppliers, but when it comes to deployments in the wild, IT buyers around Europe are still hanging back from the technology due to a lack of understanding, with the UK lagging particularly far behind.

This was one of the key findings in the Computer Weekly/TechTarget 2015 IT priorities study, an in-depth look at the budgets and purchasing plans of enterprise IT buyers from around the world.

A software-defined network can be defined essentially as one in which control has been decoupled from the hardware and passed over to a software application, or controller.

Advocates of this approach to the network say it brings benefits in terms of network administration and traffic shaping, allowing centralised control and a more granular view of what is going on in the network, which is particularly helpful in a multi-tenanted cloud architecture.

But in the UK, the study found that just 2% of IT buyers were planning to implement SDN in their networks in 2015, as the technology is still seen as very much in its infancy, with reference customers still thin on the ground.

Globally, the picture for SDN was more encouraging, with around 15% expecting to implement it this year, reflecting increased appetite for the technology in Asia-Pacific, where 21% of buyers said they planned to implement it.