In this report, Futurum Research Founder and Principal Analyst Daniel Newman and Senior Analyst Fred McClimans discuss how digital transformation is an ongoing process of leveraging digital technologies to build flexibility, agility and adaptability into business processes. Discover the nine critical data points that measure the current state of digital transformation in the enterprise to uncover new opportunities, improve business agility, and achieve successful cloud migration.

ESG research recently uncovered that 66% of organizations view their IT environments as more or significantly more complex than they were two years ago. The complexity will most likely increase, since 46% of organizations anticipate their network infrastructure spending to exceed that of 2018 as they upgrade and expand their networks.

Large enterprise and service provider networks consist of multiple device types—routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers—with proprietary operating systems (OS) and different configuration rules. As organizations support more applications and users, their networks will grow and become more complex, making it more difficult to verify and manage correctly implemented policies across the entire network. Organizations have also begun to integrate public cloud services with their on-premises networks, adding further network complexity to manage end-to-end policies.

With increasing network complexity, organizations cannot easily confirm that their networks are operating as intended when they implement network and security policies. Moreover, when considering a fix to a service-impact issue or a network update, determining how it may impact other applications negatively or introduce service-affecting issues becomes difficult. To assess adherence to policies or the impact of any network change, organizations have typically relied on disparate tools and material—network topology diagrams, device inventories, vendor-dependent management systems, command line (CLI) commands, and utilities such as “ping” and “traceroute.” The combination of these tools cannot provide a reliable and holistic assessment of network behavior efficiently.

Organizations need a vendor-agnostic solution that enables network operations to automate the verification of network implementations against intended policies and requirements, regardless of the number and types of devices, operating systems, traffic rules, and policies that exist. The solution must represent the topology of the entire network or subsets of devices (e.g., in a region) quickly and efficiently. It should verify network implementations from prior points in time, as well as proposed network changes prior to implementation. Finally, the solution must also enable organizations to quickly detect issues that affect application delivery or violate compliance requirements.

Composable Infrastructures direct-connect compute and storage resources dynamically—using virtualized networking techniques controlled by software. Instead of physically constructing a server with specific internal devices (storage, NICs, GPUs or FPGAs), or cabling the appropriate device chassis to a server, composable enables the virtual connection of these resources at the device level as needed, when needed.

Download this report from Eric Slack, Senior Analyst at the Evaluator Group to learn how Liqid’s software-defined platform delivers comprehensive, multi-fabric composable infrastructure for the industry’s widest array of data center resources.