8 Reasons Why NFV Matters To The Enterprise

According to IHS Infonetics, the network functions virtualization (NFV) market will likely grow from $2.3 billion in 2015 to $11.6 billion by 2019. And while only a small portion of networking purchases today are influenced by virtualization technologies, that number is expected to skyrocket.

NFV technology separates networking tasks like network address translation (NAT), firewalling, intrusion detection, load balancing, domain name service (DNS), WAN optimization and caching from the hardware they run on. Without NFV, organizations typically deploy multiple specialized appliances in order to meet their needs for these various services. But with NFV, organizations can use standardized, commodity hardware running software in a virtual machine (VM) to serve these various functions. It is different from but complementary to software-defined networking (SDN), and the two technologies are often deployed in tandem.

The earliest proponents of NFV were service providers, who were attracted by the technology's promised cost savings and greater agility. They helped create some early NFV standards under the auspices of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Now, enterprises are also becoming more interested in deploying NFV technology for a variety of reasons.

(Image: lsmagilov/iStockphoto)