Industry pundits predict that in 2014 the enterprise networking industry will undergo a major transformation. Trends from the last year, that is, cloud computing, BYOD, social media, and big data will persist to drive businesses of all shapes and sizes to primarily rethink over their business strategies.

With software-defined networking all set to become ubiquitous, and enterprise networks and movement of their mission-critical data on to the cloud, a lot of action is expected to take place in the networking realm in coming months.

All the assurances offered by these new technologies do bring in a plethora of confusion along with them. Often, these confusions prove to be dreadful for incumbent businesses, however quite beneficial for the end-users. However, in the year ahead consumers will again be considered as winners, so will be the businesses that are more open to the journey of transformation. While businesses that will resist transformation might have to face the repercussions.

Here are Key Industry Trends in Networking to Watch for:

SDN will Gain Popularity Worldwide

SDN has already gained much hype among Web 2.0 companies. And, they have already done a quick rundown of their business strategies and dedication to the technology. More and more businesses are undoubtedly expected to follow suit. However, the varying industry trends such as mobility, cloud, social media, and big data analytics to some extent are likely to stretch IT budgets. Implementation of SDN will gain momentum in 2014 with its ability to trim down operational costs and scale network resources. Hence, it will become essential for businesses to embrace solutions that bridge the wide gap between physical and virtual worlds, thereby encouraging SDN to thrive in times to come ahead.

Networks Become More Advanced With Built-In Intelligence

Enterprise networks will become highly advanced and automated with built-in network intelligence and analytics. Organizations will be empowered with the capability to proactively monitor network traffic on all ports and identify sudden spurt of traffic beforehand. This furthermore enables the data center network manager to spot on the latent network hotspots. Consequently, they will be able to acclimatize to the varying needs of their networks and workloads can be reallocated to timely thwart network congestion from affecting overall performance and application delivery.

Enterprises will Completely Slot in their Networks into Cloud

Cloud computing will become even more inherent to business strategy and IT leaders will have to reorganize the role played by the network completely to deliver world-class services. Data centers typically operate in silos and any lack of integration between computing, storage, and networking will definitely prohibit businesses from accomplishing their business goals of agility and operational efficiency. The enterprises should try to understand the benefits of the cloud to accomplish these goals. By doing this deployment and orchestration systems will become more established and the management of data centers will be about workflow management. Consequently, there will be complete assimilation of the network into the cloud workflow, thereby making it well-organized operationally and simplified to rapidly meet varying demands.

Virtualization of Delivery Service

Well, speaking about virtualization, would say that it is now apparent to all of us now that SDN has made its headway in the data center and enterprise milieu. However, service providers are also keeping a close check on the concept of physical resources for more elasticity, quicker service acceleration, and ultimately easier management. So in the year ahead, expect to hear a lot more about network virtualization.

Why networking through the cloud?

Cloud networking is the new age networking infrastructure that has completely revolutionized the whole networking industry. It completely improves and accelerates organizations’ network capabilities. Irrespective of whether the resources are hosted over a public or a private cloud platform, a cloud network is always beneficial according to the networking industry overview.

Moreover, a hybrid cloud infrastructure gives a new touch to the idea of networking. Components like virtual routers, firewalls, and bandwidth improve network management which is and will change the networking industry trends.

Hence opting for cloud networking will make the networking of your organization more agile and will accelerate the sales and time in the market.

In a nutshell, would say that the coming months in 2014 are expected to be a much busier and tumultuous time. We are in an era of constant change, and in 2014 way more are expected to unveil.