How to move to a disruptive network technology with minimal disruption

Disruptive network technologies are great—at least until they threaten to disrupt essential everyday network services and activities. That's when it's time to consider how innovations such as SDN, SD-WAN, intent-based networking (IBN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) can be transitioned into place without losing a beat."To be disruptive, some disruption is often involved," says John Smith, CTO and co- founder of LiveAction, a network performance software provider. "The best way to limit this is to use proven technology versus something brand new—you never want to be the test case." Smith suggests limiting risk by following a crawl, walk and run approach. "Define the use case and solve it while initially limiting the risk exposure to a discrete set of end users for proof of concept testing," he says. "It’s always good to ensure that the business case will drive the need for the disruptive networking technology—it helps justify the action.”