Five success factors for infrastructure transformation
Successful infrastructure transformation demands:
A single view of infrastructure
Often, legacy network infrastructure doesn’t give businesses visibility of application and network performance. There’s no overall view of the customer experience – a critical starting point to improving that experience.
The march towards the digital enterprise must consolidate security, networking monitoring and visibility into a single platform. End-to-end application visibility also includes the industrial internet of things (IIOT). Businesses can onboard all the IIOT sensors then ‘service chain’ them with apps running in a virtual network. Experience has shown that onboarding 6,000 IOT devices saves one person’s worth of skilled labour every year.
Organisations that don’t have a single dashboard view of networks and applications will struggle to manage the network and optimise it for cloud performance. Nicolas Fischbach, Global CTO at Forcepoint, says: “Visibility is key, right? You cannot decide, you cannot act, you cannot know what's going on, if you don’t have visibility into the environment.”
Quang Phuong, Director of Network Engineering | HedgeServ
It has always been the bane of our existence in the IT world, getting a single pane of glass across all different disparate systems and networks. In the cloud it’s much easier because every vendor has built in tools.
Companies that have good visibility of their infrastructure and applications have achieved great things with it. Pat Harper, CTO at PGI, says: “I have more analytics through the processes and tools that we’ve got today than I had when it was in fixed infrastructure. And not only that, I've got the ability to scale it up and down in ways that I've never had before, so I don't have to dump millions of dollars in capital expenditures to size up for peak usage.”
Cooper Chien, IT Director | Huawei Technologies
We have a lot of new tools that enable us to efficiently manage issues without human intervention. SD-WAN provides a single dashboard to observe our network traffic.
Alexander Morozov, Director of Infrastructure at Affidea, highlights that, “In order to meet the challenges of digital transformation, traditional Wide Area Networks such as MPLS are being replaced with more dynamic and agile technologies such as SD-WAN.” He points out: “Visibility over the network and the traffic evolution of business applications are always crucial for operations. Lack of it can lead to a catastrophe. You have to track your network consumption and how the pattern is evolving. You can react to an incident quickly, but not to a network capacity issue – that usually takes longer to fix. I believe in the coming years businesses will move more towards FOG architectures. As the cost of technology decreases and its capabilities increase, it would make sense to spread the operational risks across multiple smaller hubs as opposed to collecting them all in one location (e.g. cloud DC). With storage and processing power becoming more and more readily available and affordable, the central benefit of FOG will revolve around data resiliency and performance. Data spread over a few hubs is more resilient – harder to damage, and performance will improve the closer you get to the point of creation of data and consumption of services.”
Action Points:
Prioritise a single dashboard view of networks and applications – including the IIOT.
Use data to drive the business and improve operating costs.
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