October 2015 //
The IT industry has undergone several major shifts since computing became a business resource. The mainframe era gave way to client/server computing, which then ceded its position as the dominant compute model to a branch-centric computing model. Today, the industry sits in the midst of another major computing revolution: the shift to cloud computing.
Each computing era significantly changed the role of the network—and with it the requirements for networking solution providers. Because the client/server era put a premium on local connectivity, enterprises built robust local-area networks (LANs). In this era, almost all enterprise network traffic went from the data center to branch offices; therefore, businesses built large, private wide-area networks (WANs) to connect remote locations. Consequently, businesses chose their service providers based almost exclusively on the size of their network footprint.