Published on the 14/09/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson
Forget about innovation on the way to a digitally transformed organisation, because unless the infrastructure’s sorted, it isn’t going to happen…
That’s more or less the message from a report from Citrix, which shows that 52 percent of Australian and 55 percent of New Zealand companies indicate that their networks will need an upgrade before they can use emerging technologies ‘such as virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of Things, and wearables’.
IoT deployments, of course, might not fall into that category, nor, potentially, wearables, since these devices don’t typically generate masses of data but instead transmit small amounts intermittently.
In any event, Citrix ANZ Anandh Maistry senior director said the issue comes down to being able to handle volumes of information with new applications and technologies put on to existing networks. “Particularly things like AR and VR, artificial intelligence, robotics – these are the pressing ones and there is an opportunity for the infrastructure to become more proficient.”
With gigabit Ethernet nothing new, nor the concept of Quality of Service, we asked Maistry what the upshot of this finding was – is it a bandwidth thing? And does it mean a rip and replace of network infrastructure? “Well, it isn’t catastrophic by any means, but the findings of the survey do give an opportunity to step back and ask ‘what is it that we are trying to achieve with our network? Should it be more application-centric, what will be required to make it efficient and effective’.”
He added that capacity is one of the issues and also said that a lot of new applications are productivity-geared and require maximum usage of the network. “It’s often those productivity applications that go into the cloud and if the solutions are poorly architected, it tends to boil up.”
QoS is all well and good, too, but, noted Maistry with a solid point, “Every new app wants priority.”
There are more facts and figures from the study, titled ‘The Impact of Network Performance on Business Goals and Cost’ which polled the opinions of senior decision makers in 266 businesses with between 500 and 1000 employees. It said productivity losses from network outages for Australian businesses equate to 71 hours per employee per year. In New Zealand, network admins are evidently doing a slightly better job, with the number pegged at 52 hours. Impact on revenue? Unruly networks ‘adversely affect 23 percent of a company’s revenue source’ in Australia; ‘New Zealand firms state it affects 14 percent of the revenue stream’.
In Citrix’s press release, Maistry was candid, noting that while expectations for emerging technologies are high, “The reality is investment in the majority of solutions will first require investment in somewhat ‘mundane’ areas, one of which is the networking environment.”
Get the foundations in place, in other words, before building the castle.
The research is available for download.
