For MSPs, this challenge is more of an incentive to invest more in equipping their staff with relevant skills to be able to effectively manage IT systems. Besides, SDN allows for scalability of services across different customers, so MSPs stand to gain if they are well equipped.

Unfortunately, SDN is evolving at a relatively slow pace. Most of the enterprises with highly virtualized data centers often face deployment challenges in their quest for a rapid deployment, more automation, and more granular configurations. There are several open source orchestration tools that are available for free download. However, interoperability issues still persist.

The major problem is that SDN solves one part of the next-generation equation. The goal is to have a framework that supports virtualization.

SDN will have a huge impact on the role of a majority of networking professionals, especially networking engineers who haven’t dwelled much into newer technology. Even for virtualization-savvy pros, SDN will still present challenges because, in the processes of simplifying the interface, software-defined networking puts an additional layer on top of the already complex network.

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