As economic pressure keeps growing, enterprises' CxOs require (almost) systematically studying the financial impact of each new IT project. We propose to discuss this quite complex topic in a suite of posts to come.
Like many (if not all) things in life, economic impacts can be considered under two very different angles:productivity increase (“Yang”)and expenses reduction (“Yin”).
When this question is addressed by enterprises at global and strategic level, the network can actively participate to both of them.
- YANG: Productivity increase
a) Ensuring an appropriate, predictable and stable level of performance, no matter where or when. The goal is here to improve business operations thanks to the sustainability and predictability of good performance in every circumstance: peak time of the day, end of week activity increase, end of month financial consolidation, antivirus database update and all the many unplanned events that occur on the enterprise network and impact users’ quality of experience. It is possible to achieve this predictability through various techniques like Quality of Service (QoS), application SLAs, network optimization, etc. the mixture of them depending on the nature of the business application (real-time voice, time sensitive transactional apps, ...) and on the characteristic of the network (its size, reach, access technology, etc.). Objective-based management and Autonomic networking have proven exceptional effectiveness towards such a goal.
b) Maximizing the performance of business applications over the network may reduce users' waiting time and provide them with direct and personal productivity improvements. Often called Wan Optimization, application acceleration is achieved by using different techniques (according to the nature of applications and networks) like redundancy elimination, caching, protocol acceleration, etc.
c) Providing IT agility in order to facilitate strategic transformations of the infrastructure: centralization of application servers, desktop virtualization, collaborative applications, etc. The productivity improvement comes here from a better managed and more cost effective IT organization at the global enterprise level. The network is always a key part and very often the most impacting success (or failure) factor of such transformation, so its contribution must be carefully understood.
2. YIN: Expenses reduction
a) Bandwidth reduction, would it be immediate decrease or differed network access increase, can be achieved through network efficiency increase and redundancy elimination (compression) approaches. It is current to achieve an x3 reduction factor (or an increase postponed by 3+ years), which drives a significant impact on the network cost.
b) Network operation simplification actively participates to cost reduction, thanks to proactive incident elimination and shorter resolution time. It makes use of active techniques, deep application understanding and crystal-clear visibility and reporting.
c) Investment reduction, the purpose of which being to limit the deployment of dedicated technologies that might have negative consequences in cost, logistics and operation complexity. Asymmetric deployments and different flavor of virtualization are examples of solutions that participate to such reduction by limiting the hardware deployed in branch offices.
We will talk soon about each of these aspects, diving progressively into more details and providing examples and discussions. I expect you to share your experiences and advices in this multi-face area.
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