By - Dhananjay Ganjoo, Managing Director for India and SAARC at F5
The acceleration in digital transformation and the emerging technologies supporting it are creating new possibilities for businesses to reinvent key traditional infrastructure elements in their enterprise architecture. Today, the location of data, workloads, and users is no longer centralised or fixed. As a result, many businesses have transitioned from traditional to compute infrastructure to evolve and adapt to the digital/hybrid world. With the evolution of new infrastructure components such as advanced servers, security, network, storage, and software development, compute infrastructure has emerged as an essential tool in enabling organisations to break through barriers in the changing digital landscape and ensure business continuity.
In the current era of 5G, cloud, and other new-age technologies, traditional IT infrastructure platforms hinder the ability to implement efficient system controls. This results in the incapability to support business development needs, especially when there are specific workload demands, which may require a platform to coordinate across business units. The adoption of new digital technologies and platform systems has, thus, become de-facto for businesses to modernise their operations and accelerate return on investments at an unprecedented speed.
With the 5G trend growing in India, business transformation and evolution to support technology are at the core of every business decision. While the combination of 5G connectivity and edge cloud is set to provide benefits to businesses and consumers, businesses need to redefine how they interact and derive value from their network.
5G Transition Goals
The 5G network infrastructure demands ten times more bandwidth than what the 4G infrastructure currently supports. While the next generation of wireless cellular technology promises efficiency and effectiveness in everyday high-demanding operations, new business models and an improved, agile, and automated infrastructure will be essential to capitalise on the opportunities it brings with it. Additionally, this technological evolution also poses new security challenges. Given that the threat landscape is expected to evolve with 5G’s increased attack surface, ensuring appropriate safeguards to protect the network from malicious actors will be crucial to improve resilience and reliability.
Infrastructure Roadmap
Enterprises must ensure that their infrastructure has the required cloud-native, containerised, service-based architecture to meet the diverse requirements. Container workloads managed using Kubernetes are critical, as it enhances performance, speed, and efficiency by enabling the right placement of an application and its workloads within the network. Implementing embedded capabilities to achieve high levels of security, visibility, and signalling control to protect the 5G network and the customers across the entire cloud-native infrastructure will lay a foundation of differentiation.
This significant architectural shift in deploying the 5G infrastructure would be evident in most transformative technology transitions and would help unleash new opportunities for enterprises. However, maintaining interoperability across existing 3G and 4G protocols, applications, systems, policies, and infrastructure is crucial. By leveraging a robust cloud-native infrastructure solution, enterprises can gain visibility, control, and security. This reduces costs and complexities across the core, edge, and far edge of 5G networks, all while ensuring smooth interoperability with 4G and legacy networks.
The radical rise in transformation in every domain in the traditional enterprise architecture can no longer be ignored. Businesses are realising that this technology transformation is a must-have for delivering customer value and driving business development in this up-and-coming 5G era. By implementing a cloud-native infrastructure early in the 5G transformation journey, businesses can emerge as leaders in the next decade and stay one step ahead of the competitive curve.
