The power of networking in users’ hands

Software-defined networking allows cloud users to setup and manage their own customized networking infrastructure using their own non-privileged, non-administrator access. Historically, making networking configurations required a skilled administrator physically moving cables around or logging into physical networking devices to make configuration changes. These changes also often impacted all traffic moving through the phsyical networking devices. When your cloud platform supports software-defined networking, you can make all these changes yourself without having an impact on other users and without bothering the systems administrators who manage the cloud’s physical infrastructre.

Networking is important for security and privacy

Your network setup within your cloud platform determines what cloud resources you have can be accessed from the public Internet and from within the cloud resources you have setup. When you can manage your own networking, you can setup networks that isolate secure data from the public Internet and even from other resources in your own cloud infrastructure. This isolation is important for preventing unauthorized access to secure data that has to remain private.

Software-defined networking features usually also include firewall management at the networking level. If you have this feature available, you can control, often to a fine-degree of detail, the traffic that is allowed into or out of the cloud resources or networks you have setup. Firewalls are another helpful tool for protecting against unauthorized or malicious access. Network firewalls also are great to have if you run applications or technology that do not cooperate well with firewalls that run inside of virtual machine instances.