Enterprises tune up enterprise networking as cloud spending grows

Gartner analysts predict the growth in enterprise IT spend for cloud-based offerings will be faster than the growth in traditional, non-cloud spending through 2022. This shift of enterprise IT spend, coupled with the speed of innovation of IT cloud services, has seen 50% of organisations adopt cloud networking.

As the industry shifts gears, Extreme Networks is innovating to become the industry's first cloud driven end-to-end enterprise networking vendor. The uptake of its cloud management platform, ExtremeCloud IQ, has grown by 40% over the past twelve months, with an average of more than 25,000 daily administrator logins to manage millions of devices worldwide.

"There is significant interest in ExtremeCloud IQ for the simplicity and ease of management that cloud networking platforms bring to organisations," says Extreme Networks Australia and New Zealand general manager Julian Critchlow.

Extreme completed the migration of its Sydney-based instance of ExtremeCloud IQ, enabling complete fourth generation cloud deployment that is built on microservices. ExtremeCloud IQ is unlike anything seen before. Microservices are significant as a software architecture where a complex application is composed of small, independent processes communicating with each other using APIs.

In an agile development process, a new feature is quickly created and deployed within an individual microservice, as opposed to the entire application, meaning the speed at which new features appear in ExtremeCloud IQ is unsurpassed.

"Fourth generation cloud-driven network management, access control, and business insights brings the benefits of elastic IT to the network management realm for Australian and New Zealand organisations to leverage today," explains Critchlow.

"With a containerised cloud platform, Extreme can deliver a flexible and infinitely expandable management layer that is no longer tied down to a cloud provider, hardware, or operating system. It means we can orchestrate network management services wherever our customers and partners want to run them."

This flexibility is proving to be significant in supporting the fundamental operational changes currently taking place in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Flexible subscription models for ExtremeCloud IQ that allow organisations to switch and reassign management licences to different devices across the enterprise network is proving popular.

With many organisations now instituting work from home or remote working arrangements for their teams, as well as health providers setting up temporary pop-up clinics or treatment facilities, this management portability is ensuring optimal performance, security and visibility on the most strategically important network devices and wireless access points to meet a rapidly evolving environment.

The design architecture of ExtremeCloud IQ is also leading to the acceleration of AI and machine learning capabilities on the platform to automate routine network administration and configuration functions such as alerts, diagnosis and rectifying security issues.

Ultimately, the device licence portability and the opex subscription-based model has a flat annual fee of USD$150 RRP per device across Extreme's entire family of switches and access points, regardless of device, making comprehensive network management more cost-effective and accessible to a broader set of organisations than ever before.

"The cloud management costs per device for Wi-Fi access points, are on par across the industry whilst annual management fees for some industry switches can be in the thousands of dollars per annum," says Critchlow.

Critchlow believes more organisations are set to take advantage of the fully containerised platform, ExtremeCloud IQ, for its portability it to deploy on almost any infrastructure – public or private cloud or on premise – and the ease of management by internal IT teams or through a managed services or outsourcing partner.

"Flexibility in deployment and usage means our network management platform can adapt to fit with our customers' operations and systems to deliver simplicity, cost efficiencies, network analytics and insights.

To learn more about what Extreme Networks can offer, click here.