As the speed of change increases, organizations are moving to the cloud for its promise of limitless scale, flexibility, and agility. But the wide adoption of cloud—plus mobility, the Internet of Things (IoT), and big data applications—is having profound impacts on IT infrastructures.

The traditional way of implementing networks and services in hardware makes them static, rigid, and manual. What’s more, these networks struggle to respond as application requirements rapidly change and new applications are spun up and moved to different cloud environments.

To pull off a move to the cloud with minimal disruption, businesses need to architect their networks to meet the connectivity, service, and security requirements of these increasingly dynamic applications. The goal is to make the network policy-driven, programmable, scalable, and automated to connect ideas to opportunities.

Juniper’s approach to software-defined networking allows you to evolve an open, agile, and elastic infrastructure based on these principles:

Freedom of Choice: Flexible deployment options allow implementation to be started anywhere in the network with the ability to grow and evolve over time. Multivendor support, seamless interoperability, and consistent security across physical and virtual elements prevent expensive vendor lock-in and allow best-of-breed choices that can future-proof your infrastructure.

Intelligent Automation: Insights based on data-derived knowledge of network operations guide automation decisions and close the infrastructure provisioning feedback loop through a policy-driven, programmable infrastructure. Rich analytics collected from all infrastructure resources with correlations between virtual and physical layers improve measurement precision and visibility, capacity planning and optimization, troubleshooting, and real-time network telemetry.

Always-on Reliability: Support for business continuity and business-critical applications is gained through highly available, highly secure, and seamlessly scalable software and hardware.

Networks built on these principles give you an ideal foundation for building secure, elastic clouds. With Juniper’s SDN solutions, you can evolve your infrastructure to private, public, or hybrid clouds, introducing support for multitenancy, self-service, and automated operations.

These networks are also the ideal platform for service providers to realize Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). On this platform, you can dynamically create agile services that adjust configurations over a common resource pool, customize service combinations and chaining through policy automation, and greatly reduce operational complexities, risks, and time to revenue.