For the past decade, networking has followed the same trajectory as much of IT: abstracting intelligence away from individual devices, centralizing control into software and treating the underlying hardware as largely interchangeable. Software‑defined wide area network (WAN), software‑defined local area network (LAN) and centralized orchestration tools became the norm.
In many ways, this shift delivered exactly what enterprises needed: greater agility, centralized policy control, automation at scale and simplified network operations. The…
