These days, your network must move your data from where it’s gathered to where it’s analyzed, then to where it fuels automated operations and real-time decisions. And your network must do this at scale, at speed, and securely across multiple devices, data centers, services, clouds, and, increasingly, edges of clouds — at all the times and in all the places where you conduct business.
How can you achieve this sort of end-to-end networking?
Until recently, the chief culprit in unplanned network downtime was power failure. These days, however, network errors and IT system problems play the main villains — and network errors were identified as the primary cause for 32% of outages in 2018.
That number becomes even more alarming when you consider that just a year earlier network errors accounted for only 19% of outages.
So why was there a 68% jump between 2017 and 2018 in the rate that network errors triggered unplanned downtime?
As you’ve handed off more and more data and applications to the cloud, you may think you’re now beyond losing any of your cloud-resident data and apps — because, after all, the cloud vendor’s multiple, diversely located data centers obviate that, right?
I urge you to think again.
It’s not that you’re necessarily entirely wrong. It’s that you may be only half right — and the half that is not right could put your business in peril.
By 2025, 80% of enterprises will give up their on-premises data centers and move workloads to co-location and/or cloud and managed services.
Do you see your assorted cloud services as, in effect, satellite data centers with mostly the same old operational and management issues?
In fact, your increasingly cloud-centric IT environment is becoming an ever more complex hybrid that needs to be managed in entirely new ways. Unless your organization is large, your best option is to turn to a trusted managed service provider with deep cloud experience.
Any of these five signs tells you it’s time to bring in a managed services provider to help you rationalize your quickly cloudifying IT infrastructure:
Swapping a traditional wide-area network (WAN) for a new kind of branch and remote-location network connectivity — software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) — reduces operational costs and improves resource usage as well as security.
In my last post, I described why this is true and enumerated several SD-WAN approaches, including appliances, software licensing, SD-WAN as a service, and SD-WAN managed services.
But which sort of SD-WAN capability is right for you? Approaches break down into two types: do it yourself or turn to some sort of SD-WAN service.
