How Network Technology Affects Business Today | Key to the Black Box #1
Whatever your organization calls it, and however you measure it, one of the most important KPI’s in financial stewardship is cost. One category where many organizations spend a lot of money is network connectivity. We all need to be able to connect, but the added layers of technical complexity and slow responses leave many feeling like their service providers might be taking advantage of them. So let’s look at (among other benefits) how we can leverage network technology to reduce waste and ensure stewardship.
The Situation
Business has changed. Of course, “the way business is done” is something that is constantly evolving, and those changes are known to frequently follow shifts in technology. Certainly, the recent shifts in networking technology have greatly influenced business behavior. So much so, in fact, that the resulting changes in business behavior have demanded even further advances in technology.
One of the two most noticeable changes is that, for many businesses, data is no longer either on-premise or centralized. Instead of sending all branches back to HQ or to a datacenter repository, employees may be connecting to one cloud service for their e-mail, a second one for their CRM, a third one for webinars and video conferencing, and a fourth one for data storage, all while needing access to various web resources. Specifically because all of that traffic is now leaving the organization’s WAN, with the sudden shift to cloud-based services there is a parallel and proportionate increase to the strain put on the firewall. For a company that previously kept many of these services inside a private WAN, the requirements could exceed the firewall’s capabilities.
There is a significant force multiplier that is enjoyed by moving to the cloud. The readily available compute power makes true computational scalability a matter of a monthly subscription. In a way, this can be a double-edged sword. As power has increased, applications have increased their ability to consume greater resources. VOIP and video conferencing applications are rapidly rising in business use, requiring high bandwidth with high uptime and low latency, often needing an additional capability to prioritize traffic.
Not only are many key applications moving to the cloud, but, in a sense, so are the workers. The remote and mobile workforce is constantly expanding, and businesses expect this portion of their workforce to continue to grow. If we also include the multi-device users into this group, we can easily see the need for accessibility to any app, from any device, at any location. The balancing consideration to this is the increased need for security. With the idea of the “perimeter” effectively shattered by anywhere-access, there needs to be a strong means of authenticating and authorizing users, so as to reduce the chances of letting the wrong people into your network.
The other most noticeable change is the gap between broadband internet and private WAN services has become too great to ignore. When broadband meant 10M/3M of fluctuating and unreliable cable internet, then it made sense to pay 3x as much to get 10M/10M of guaranteed bandwidth. Now that cable internet can reach speeds of 1G/30M for roughly $500/month, dealing with a 10% fluctuation makes more sense than paying $1K/month for a 20M guaranteed pipe. Beyond that, broadband now also includes products like FIOS, ABF, and Fiber+, which bring fiber directly to the consumer, offering unguaranteed but symmetrical high-bandwidth internet circuits for hundreds less per month than their guaranteed counterparts.
The culmination of all of this is that an organization’s WAN now needs to be more accessible, more distributed, more secure, and more reliable than ever before, but it also needs to cost less.
Easy enough, right?
Through this series we will be providing many of the “Keys To The Black Box” that is SDWAN, so you can reach your organizational objectives regardless of whether you’re in the (re-)evaluating, deploying, or management stages of the SDWAN lifecycle.
