The Modern Network Explained

The Modern Network framework provides key guiding principles for how to think about and build your environment. Zero trust security is built into all aspects.

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The Modern Network Pillars

The Modern Network Pillars

Tenet 1: Superior User to App Experience, Anywhere and on Any Device

Tenet 2: Enforce Connectivity and Service Objectives

User experience is paramount in today’s world. End users expect the same application experience and service objectives no matter where an application is accessed or what device is used. Building a Modern Network starts with a common identity foundation for users and applications that underpins an end-to-end trust model.

Organizations need a framework in place that allows them to iterate and adapt quickly to evolving customer and market needs. Modern applications demand reliable connectivity, dynamic service discovery and the ability to make changes quickly and automatically without business disruption. This requires the ability to set, measure and guarantee application connectivity service objectives consistently across your organization while adapting to changing conditions. Among these functions are tools providing application and network self-healing capabilities, automated detection and remediation.

Tenet 3: A Self-healing Framework for Any Application, Anywhere

Tenet 4: Cloud Elasticity at Any Scale

Application velocity and time-to-market considerations require organizations to build a Modern Network that can deliver any application to any user anywhere over any infrastructure or connection. The network needs to be self-driven to deliver agility. Applications and data are delivered across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. On a practical level, this means that the Modern Network needs the ability to support any combination of bare-metal, virtual machines, containers, IaaS and serverless infrastructure. Organizations need to deliver public cloud scalability and simplicity over private or hybrid cloud environments with autoscaling flexibility to protect the application experience while optimizing cost. Security policies should scale with capacity, and networks should be able to port over to other infrastructures seamlessly for business continuity. These capabilities enable Networking as Code—a complete network stack that is automated and self-healing with consistent policy and cloud management, cloud elasticity, and scale.

Tenet 5: Fast and Simple Physical Underlay Independent of the Heterogenous Infrastructure

Physical network infrastructure in the Modern Network is generic. It’s built using general–purpose hardware whose sole purpose is to move bits fast and efficiently in support of the user journey and application experience. Physical infrastructure can sit anywhere—in the data center, in the branch, in the cloud or on the edge in 5G, IoT and service providers networks. It needs to be empowered by a software-centric policy and network management model. Organizations should be able to add or subtract any hardware from the environment easily and seamlessly and further enhance flexibility, performance and security with SmartNICs and bare-metal options.

Powering Customer Innovation Through Network Modernization

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Automate to Deliver a Consistent End-User Experience

IHS Markit embraces agile automation principles across applications and infrastructure to deliver a consistent end-user experience.

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Break Down Network Silos to Speed up Innovation

Intrado leverages an end-to-end services team to eliminate silos and evolve networking and security at the speed of the application.

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Achieve API-driven Self-Service

Trend Micro innovates faster and improves operational agility with an API-driven self-service approach.

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Scale Across DC and Cloud, VMs and Containers

William Hill looks to the future with real-time scaling across Data Center and Cloud, VMs and containers, to rapidly meet changing customer demand.

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IHS Markit
Intrado Media
Trend Micro
William Hill

Learn What Industry Experts Are Saying

IDC Business Report

IDC examines the business implications of the Modern Network in this industry analysis.

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ESG Technology Report

ESG provides insight into the Modern Network from a tech perspective.

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The Industry Perspective

IDC’s Brad Casemore shares where the market will go in the next five years.

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Put the Modern Network to Work for Your Organization

The Modern Network Brings the Public Cloud Experience On-premises

The Modern Network puts applications and the end-user experience at the forefront by providing a secure network on-demand that easily meets connectivity and performance objectives, across on-premises and cloud environments.

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Work from Anywhere with SD-WAN and SASE

Legacy network approaches lack the scale and intrinsic security across a global business fabric, leading to accelerated adoption of SD-WAN and the emergence of Secure Access Services Edge (SASE).

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An Adaptive SLO-driven Network for Application Availability and Performance

Tool, process and policy sprawl on multi-cloud is real. The Modern Network implements global load balancing and common application-level performance objectives that initiate corrective actions when objectives are not met.

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Granular Detection, Avoidance, Auto-remediation—the Case for Self-healing Networks

An end-to-end self-healing network requires data convergence and network intelligence that can detect, analyze, report and automatically apply remediation using self-healing workflows across the end-user application journey.

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Achieve Cloud-scale Application Availability and Security

Hybrid Cloud Adoption and the challenge of securing East-West traffic

ESG analysts Doug Cahill and John Grady share results from a survey of IT decision makers, exploring cloud priorities, hybrid cloud adoption and the complexities in achieving consistent policy and centralized control in multi-cloud deployments.

SOLUTION BRIEF

A Distributed Approach to Achieve Intrinsic Zero-trust Security

The modern internal firewall is software-based and designed to protect large volumes of East-West traffic without sacrificing security coverage, network performance or operational agility.

SOLUTION BRIEF

Fault Tolerant Network Design for High Application Availability

Enterprises are seeking enhanced availability and resiliency in an always-on application environment. Learn how built-in fault isolation converts complex resiliency and disaster recovery designs into a simple to operate, highly resilient network infrastructure.

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Build for Operational Efficiency and Scale Across the Stack

Proactively Manage Your Network with Business Intent

Manage infrastructure, networks, clouds and applications with a new approach that mathematically analyzes the network to enable proactive management and troubleshooting.

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Network, it’s Time to Modernize!

Learn more about the tenets and pillars of the Modern Network and how they help bring the public cloud experience to the private cloud.

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Enhanced Visibility Across All Cloud Environments

Manage the scale of machine-generated data with intuitive visibility and intelligence across all clouds with real-time traffic debugging and security logging capability of vRealize Log Insight.

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Accelerate Your Network Using SmartNICs

Leverage high performance networking, distributed firewalling, IDS/IPS, and enhanced observability by offloading NSX from the hypervisor to DPUs.

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