New technologies, capacity challenges, and security threats put network managers at the center of one of the most challenging roles in IT.

As with many areas of IT, network technology is evolving at a rapid pace. New networking initiatives extend from foundational technologies to a host of emerging ones, involving the full spectrum of routing, switching, WAN management, unified communications, LANs, wireless, network systems management and administration, mobility, and, of increasing importance, security.

The consolidation of data centers into fewer sites is merely one of the reasons behind bottlenecks in WAN traffic, leading to congestion and high latency. Such issues have been persistent challenges in maintaining application performance, and most network managers have learned that investing in additional bandwidth sometimes doesn't resolve the problem. In a recent Gartner study, WAN optimization was the top concern for data center managers. Other priorities included managing virtualized networks, optimizing Ethernet networks, and implementing private clouds. Network managers are also concerned about upgrading core switches, supporting server load-balancing, moving to 10 GB Ethernet technology, and deploying blade network switches. Other switch replacement and deployment issues were also of concern.

For IBM i administrators, whose traditional concept of the network is linking the server with a series of on-premise peripherals, connecting to the Internet has opened up a host of challenges that they traditionally have not had to confront. Such external network connections have meant jumping into the cold water of security optimization and really becoming far more expert in the area of perimeter security threats. The advent of smartphones connecting to the network has vastly enhanced the challenge.

Bob Luebbe, president of Linoma Software, says that many of his customers are being challenged by auditors who are tightening up their interpretations of the PCI regulations for companies using consumer credit card information. Having any kind of sensitive information in the so-called DMZ, or demilitarized zone (the neutral network between the Internet and a company network), is becoming unacceptable. Such restrictions, however, are making the transfer of information to and from trading partners challenging. The frequency and sophistication of hacker intrusion attempts in the last 12 months has caused a ratcheting up of security practices. Linoma has its own solution involving gateways that employ reverse and forward proxies to protect against entry into vulnerable open ports. Luebbe says that IBM midrange shops now have to adopt strategies and techniques developed earlier on more vulnerable Windows platforms due to tightened restrictions. He also sees the control and management of email, email attachments, and consumer file sharing services as another opportunity for security vendors.

Network virtualization and server virtualization are areas where network managers will be spending time in the coming months. Network virtualization and cloud computing undoubtedly will affect how enterprises look at new network management technologies. Tools built for network management in a virtual environment may ultimately prove useful in the cloud services setting. The fact that virtualized networking takes place on virtual hosts and is largely invisible to networking professionals poses a unique set of technical and administrative problems. Vendors are beginning to provide tools offering greater network visibility and control on virtual hosts. Security on virtualized networks presents yet another set of unique problems as each virtualized server represents a new point of vulnerability.

Compatibility with IPv6 Internet standards will affect network management tools, and managers will have to check that their current arsenal of tools works with all the usual features they have come to expect under IPv4. IPv6 changes the underlying architecture of data—how it's gathered, stored, and retrieved. So working with a new protocol will be different from the way data was managed under IPv4.

The demands of users for moving video and voice on the network will surely have an impact on capacity growth, or at least require the implementation of WAN optimization appliances for compressing and decompressing the data.

Next year will likely see more refinement and adoption of software-defined networking (SDN), which allows engineers to separate underlying hardware from network control. The new OpenFlow language will be used to write many new applications, and there will be questions about whether they work across existing network hardware. The field of networking is one of the more dynamic and exciting ones in tomorrow's IT landscape and will present challenges for network managers and CIOs alike.