Introduction
The digital era has arrived and is changing the business landscape faster than ever. This is why digital transformation has become a top mandate for almost every IT and business leader. The ZK Research 2018 IT Priorities Survey found that 89% of businesses currently have digital transformation initiatives underway (Exhibit 1), up from 84% in 2017. In the digital business era, sustaining market leadership is no longer about having the best products, the lowest prices or the best people. Rather, the industry leaders will be determined by an organization’s ability to understand market transitions and capitalize on them faster than the competition.
A critical step in the journey to becoming a digital organization is transforming into an agile business. Doing so requires the business’s IT infrastructure to be dynamic and able to adapt when required. However, an organization can only be as agile as its least agile IT component, which today is the network—particularly the network edge. The rise of software-defined networks (SDNs) has transformed the data center, and software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) have modernized the WAN, but the edge largely has stood still.
