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By Mike Johnson

Logicalis Director, Technical Sales

 

The network is, and will always be, the foundation for IT services delivered to end users and increasingly to customers. With that in mind, CIOs should be looking at how digitizing their network foundation can help them move forward on the transformation journey to a service-defined enterprise (SDE).

IT professionals today need to accelerate their ability to transform their processes and business models. A more fully digitized network can help align the network and, in the process, the IT environment directly with business objectives.

CIOs know they need to speed innovation, experience faster times to market and better ROI. The following three network technologies can help accomplish greater efficiency and effectiveness by accelerating the digitization of the network foundation:

  1. Software-defined networking
  2. Network virtualization
  3. Software-Defined WAN

A direct benefit of a digitized network is that it facilitates the use of analytics and automation to tap the intelligence embedded in the network and discover ways to empower your workforce as well as personalize both customer and employee experiences within your IT environment. Data analytics can help you develop game-changing interfaces that meet users’ expectations, create efficiency through ease of use, and in the long run, bolster loyalty.

Anywhere. Any Device. Anytime.

There is, of course, a caveat: Everyone knows “anywhere, any device, anytime” computing has become the baseline expectation for computing today – and nearly every CIO is working to deliver on that promise. The question you need to ask yourself now is whether or not your networking foundation is working effectively in conjunction with the application visibility and control the IT department needs to maintain. IT has to balance the need for easy access for end users with the need for acceptable risk-based levels of security.

This raises some interesting questions. Do you, for example, have enough analytics capabilities to deliver on the flexibility and promise of an anytime-anywhere computing environment while still maintaining the important role-based access and stellar threat detection and mitigation controls that keep your company’s business-critical data secure?

Things are changing rapidly in terms of what computing users expect their IT experience to be like, but that doesn’t mean you can relax your standards for delivering secure computing in the process.

As a result, savvy CIOs are already implementing new technologies like software-defined networking, network virtualization and SD WANs that will transform their computing environments into more digitally enabled intelligent infrastructures, which in turn empowers scalability, better ROI, and the use of actionable analytics that enable them to provide anywhere-anytime access to authorized users without sacrificing security in the process.

Want to learn more? Read this Logicalis white paper: “IT by Wire—Delivering IT at the Speed of Business.” You can read about Logicalis intelligent networking solutions on our website and also find out what managed services for your network can do for your organization. Take a look at our video on Tomorrow’s Workplace on the same page. And don’t miss our article on “The Importance of Securing Your Network.”