In a recent Network World interview (« Why consumerization won't kill corporate IT"), Forrester analyst Matthew Brown said: "Some people are claiming that as technology is easier to consume and provision in a self-service manner, then the role of IT goes away. That is based on a principle that all IT does is perform low-value activities around maintaining the store. In fact if you look at IT you can see that what they should be doing is more value-added activities such as building new applications and services."
We couldn't agree more, if… Oh, actually there is one "if"... Consumerization trends, such as cloud platforms, bring more complexity to network management – not less. As part of the transition to cloud computing, companies are moving to a hybrid model where some IT needs are best served by cloud platforms and others simply are not. And as IT professionals are figuring out where the cloud can be rewarding and improve IT operations, application delivery still remains their primary focus. Anything and everything go over the network, sharing the very same access to the branch where users work. It's not rare to see recreational traffic using 80% of the line. And non-MPLS usage is doubling every 12 months, for business as well as for personal usage. Local Internet breakouts and hybrid networks that are necessary to maintain the network cost at an acceptable level despite the traffic inflation, participate also to the confusion.
In such a shaky and dynamic environment, to guarantee users' experience is becoming a nightmare that will occupy a huge amount of time and energy (for poor and uncertain results) - and finally prevent IT to move up in the added-value activities Brown was speaking about… Unless enterprises use automated and dynamic tools that are intelligent enough to differentiate each app flows and individually control them – providing application performance continuity whatever the end-users' activity.
With Autonomic Networking - now available on very affordable platform like Ipanema's nano - IT gains full control and optimization of application performance for each of their branch offices, whatever the IT architecture. Hand free, automated, self-adapting… it couldn't be easier. Mission-critical operational and financial applications can now compete with bandwidth-hungry social media and video applications – without impacting users' satisfaction and business efficiency.
And IT people can finally stop running behind problems and act proactively, implementing more strategic tasks like WAN governance – in a word: more aligned to the business.
Autonomic networking: IT staff's best friend!
Béatrice
Illustration: Yan Marcziewski (2007 - no title)
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