Advances in Network Services Chain: Part 1

Small and large enterprise networks suffer constant pressure updating infrastructure to ever changing trends, techniques, and requirements used in data processing. In a typical enterprise, a data flow arrives on one of its edge routers and then traverses a “service graph” within the enterprise network: it undergoes a series of operations involving Network Address Translation (NAT), access control lists (ACLs), and firewalls before reaching the ultimate destination. The future of enterprise networking is an open software-centric and user-centric approach. As such, enterprises will finally get back complete control over their data. This will be a rocky road, though. Large, globally operating service and content providers push their own data access and governance technologies and/or standards.