If you’re boosting your IT staffing this year, you’re not alone: more than one in five small companies and nearly 40% of large companies are increasing IT staff in 2019.
If your business is like most, it’s being buffeted by three inexorable forces that have spawned very challenging crosscurrents.
As the elements of your technology infrastructure become ever more interdependent, you’ve likely faced mounting hassles associated with ensuring that they consistently deliver the levels of service your business requires.
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.
