Mike Johnson, Director of Technical Sales for Logicalis US, looks at how a digitised network can help you transform your business without sacrificing security.
The network is, and will always be, the foundation for IT services delivered to end-users and, increasingly, to customers. As technology leaders, therefore, we should be looking at how digitising the network foundation can help us move forward on the transformation journey to a fully service-defined enterprise (SDE).
Crucially we need to accelerate our ability to transform processes and business models. A more fully digitised network can help align the network and, in the process, the IT environment directly with business objectives.
Knowing that we need to speed up innovation, provide faster times to market and better ROI, the following three network technologies can help accomplish greater efficiency and effectiveness by accelerating the digitisation of the network foundation:
- Software-defined networking
- Network virtualisation
- Software-Defined WAN
A direct benefit of a digitised network is it facilitates the use of analytics and automation to tap the intelligence embedded in the network and discover ways to empower your workforce as well as personalising both customer and employee experiences within your IT environment.
Data analytics can help you develop game-changing interfaces that meet users’ expectations, create efficiency through ease of use, and in the long run, bolster loyalty.
Anywhere. Any Device. Anytime.
There is, of course, a caveat: Everyone knows “anywhere, any device, anytime” computing has become the baseline expectation for computing today – and nearly every CIO is working to deliver on that promise. The question you need to ask yourself now is whether or not your networking foundation is working effectively in conjunction with the application visibility and control the IT department needs to maintain.
IT has to balance the need for easy access for end users with the need for acceptable risk-based levels of security.
This raises some interesting questions. Do you, for example, have enough analytics capabilities to deliver on the flexibility and promise of an anytime-anywhere computing environment while still maintaining the important role-based access and stellar threat detection and mitigation controls that keep your company’s business-critical data secure?
Things are changing rapidly in terms of what computing users expect their IT experience to be like, but that doesn’t mean you can relax your standards for delivering secure computing in the process.
As a result, savvy CIOs are already implementing new technologies like software-defined networking, network virtualisation and SD WANs that will transform their computing environments into more digitally enabled intelligent infrastructures, which in turn empowers scalability, better ROI, and the use of actionable analytics that enable them to provide anywhere-anytime access to authorized users without sacrificing security in the process.