Networking Trends Paper: In this paper, you will research and report on network design and management trends over the last three years (present year minus 2) in the areas of virtualization, security, hardware, network management tools, software defined networking, and wireless. Choose, at least, three areas and explain the general trend and trends within two subsets of the area (i.e., security has subsets of physical, perimeter, monitoring) over the last three years. Use at least one figure from Google Trends showing a trend discussed in your paper. Support your information and make sure all information sources are appropriately cited. The paper must use APA 6th ed., 7th printing formatting and contain a title page, 5 to 7 pages of content, and a minimum of four peer-reviewed references. Your assignment will be graded based on the rubric, which can be viewed when clicking on the assignment submission link above

Introduction

Network design and management have been characterized by continued innovation in the areas of cloud services, server virtualization, content and mobile devices. The networking industry requires to reexamine the network architectures and design to consolidate and fit in the new innovations. The previous designs were mostly dominated by Ethernet switches largely arranged in a hierarchical protocol. The dynamic storage and computing needs in the areas of education, business, and governmental organizations among others, required a change from earlier designs that were client-server based to more reliable ones. The following are some of the new innovations that facilitated constant developments in the network design and management.

The dynamic traffic patterns

In the enterprise data center, traffic paradigm is upgrading and changing rapidly. In the previous applications, traffic patterns were based on one client-one server. New innovations in the Information Technology enabled access by different servers simultaneously, by creating ‘east-west ‘machine-to-machine controlled traffic prior to returning to the intended end user gadget in the ‘north-south’ pattern. Users consequently required access to corporate applications and information anytime in their personal devices, with a consent to connecting anywhere.

Information Technology has been characterized by many innovations and the entrepreneurs and managers preferred a computing patterns that included public cloud and private cloud, or both which consequently resulted in supplemental traffic along the WAN. With an increased use of devices such as notebooks, tablets, and smartphones in the corporate network, networking in IT had to ensure that data was protected as well as intellectual property and compliance was met. The rise in cloud services embraced by business managers and entrepreneurs demanded IT resources access by employees in the corporate world. Cloud services were to be done with intentions to enable increased security, auditing requirement of the business, and compliance. This required elastic computing scale, network resources, and storage from similar point characterized by a common set of tools (Schaeffer-Filho et al 2012). 

The ‘big data’ technology run by many servers required faster processing with direct connections between servers. The capacity of an additional network was created, at the same time becoming more sophisticated as it required a maintained connectivity at all time. With new demands by the business organizations, the network design and management has been focusing on the following areas of connectivity, to appropriately trend with new innovations and demands. The key areas include: security, software-defined networking, virtualization, hardware, network management tools, and wireless.

Software Defined Networking

It is a technology in computer networking that permit network administrators to develop programs and applications that can trigger, control, deviate, and manage the high dynamics behavior of the network. Its operation are meant to decouple the networking controller through open interfaces called northbound interface(NBI). It is  often associated with OpenFlow protocol for the remote information transfer with other network plane entities responsible to define paths across the network until the Open Networking Foundation initiation in 2011 (Roy, et.al. 2014). Software-defined networking has been promoted gradually. In 2014, during Tech Fiel