Keeping the network simple

Businesses are turning to technology to help them drive new growth, but if they skip the fundamentals, they will create bigger problems for themselves.

Connectivity is now as important as it has ever been for businesses. However, as businesses grow, their networking requirements become more complicated and potentially burdensome.

The cost of managing growing networks can spiral as IT teams battle to keep up with the demand to deploy more and more services. IT teams need to be able to speed up deployment, simplify network management to reduce costs and provide insights and data visualisation for troubleshooting.

Speed to Deployment

Businesses are accelerating their adoption of technology. This adoption is being driven by business decision makers who need fast deployments. Spending on IT is no longer just the domain of the IT department. Business managed IT deployments are growing at a faster rate than IT managed projects.

As businesses launch new digital services, IT teams need to provision new networks against tight delivery schedules. Building and managing new networks involving multiple systems is complicated. By choosing wired and wireless together, businesses can easily build high performing networks that can accommodate and scale to support new IT projects.

Did you know 63% of organisations now allow technology to be maintained outside of the IT department? Or that 41% of IT spending is coming from line of business managers. This spending is growing at a faster rate through two 2022 than sending by IT departments.

Simplified Management

It can seem as though IT teams are fighting a losing battle sometimes, being expected to both maintain critical systems and help their business create revenue. When it comes to maintaining their businesses technology stack, there are numerous, complex solutions and comparatively little time. Amongst the management headache, CEOs now expect their IT teams to find the time to create revenue generating services as well. As such, simplifying management is a key requirement.

Businesses are now leveraging numerous communications standards - such as LTE, BLE, and Zigbee - in order to take advantage of cutting-edge technology. Managing multiple systems and switching between different interfaces wastes time and can hide the root cause of networking issues. By choosing integrated access points and switches, IT teams can benefit from a converged management solution that allows them to survey their entire network from a single pane of glass. This allows them to quickly and easily tackle network problems, saving on OPEX costs and giving them more time to drive their own technology initiatives.

76% of CEOs in digitally mature business want their technology projects to 'make' rather than 'save' money.

CIO priorities are:

  • Delivering consistent and stable IT performance to the business is the top priority for CIOs
  • Improving business processes
  • Increasing operational efficiencies

Visualising the Problem

To run a network effectively, IT teams need to be able to understand what is going on. As such, the demand for insight and data from the network to help inform IT teams is at an all-time high. Running multiple vendor systems alongside each other makes this process more laborious and time consuming. However, choosing analogous wired and wireless networking infrastructure means that IT teams can leverage superior data visualisation capabilities for advanced insight into the network.

Conclusion

Connectivity has never been more important to business, but with skill shortages the time of IT specialists has never been at more of a premium and that means that simplifying management is a priority. Businesses need solutions that allow their IT teams to maintain a robust and stable network environment that supports digital transformation, whilst giving them the time to create their own digital services and drive value for the businesses they work, as is now expected of them.