Go to any trade show or technology event and you will see Software Defined {insert name here} everywhere.  Each vendor promising the panacea of ease of use, cost savings, and being ready for the future of IoT and beyond.  Moving the management duties off individual boxes into a centralized system does make it easier to operate a network leading to less time configuring and troubleshooting to reduce costs. It is that last part of being ready, what does that really mean?

If you add an IoT device, such as a badge reader to the network, is that the future?  Sure, the NetOps team can apply the SDN policy to that device and keep it segmented, but other than making it easier to apply the policy, is that really the value of SDN for the future?

While Cisco was working on building out our SDN portfolio