Matching WAN networks to changing business needs

I recently attended the WAN Summit where I took part in a panel discussion about matching network services to ever evolving business needs.

Some interesting points were raised during the panel, showing our industry is going through an exciting and challenging time.

There hasn’t been much change in the type of applications being used today but business needs are more focused around achieving higher productivity, having better control over costs and optimising resources. And now that there’s the technology available to centralise and virtualise applications, this is driving more consolidation projects but also more sensitive traffic to the centralised location, placing more importance on the performance of WANs.

We debated the definition of ‘business critical’ but concluded criticality is different for each business and it’s almost impossible to pick out the top 10 applications in that respect. What we did agree on is that our organisations now all use a wide range of applications to address different processes including algorithmic trading, hotel booking, supply chain production as well as online applications for anything from trading to dating. It’s also easy to overlook email and voice services as these are a vital staple in any organisation. All of these applications place demands on the WAN.

CIOs and IT departments are under increasing pressure as they’re now considered the ‘service providers’ within their organisations. To succeed CIOs now recognise they need to understand the real impact they have on their businesses. This new role means they have to provide defined SLAs (in an SLA sensitive world) to the rest of their organisation. For this, flexibility is the key to survival. The old waterfall approach for projects and contracts no longer works – it’s more about reviewing previous stages of implementations on an ongoing basis and revising the WAN solution accordingly to suit changing business needs and thus, meet SLAs.

The complexity surrounding WANs has come about due to the changes in the way customers are consuming IT which is raising expectations on the network side. The way IT is now consumed means that CIOs are under pressure to understand how they can use software defined networks (SDNs). Gone are the days where a piece of hardware is at the extremity of a network – now it’s virtualised. It seems we’re going through another development cycle, like when security was seen as something that was so sensitive, it couldn’t be outsourced. Now it’s the norm.

The panel discussion definitely reiterates to me that it’s an exciting ongoing customer journey for WAN. It shows how WAN innovation can enable new business models and promote positive changes for businesses. It cements my belief that technological advancements can continually help us evolve to address business needs more accurately and cost efficiently. Organisations should be embracing these advancements to achieve real business advantage.