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Fast, cheap connectivity opens up network/application management options

3 smart phones

As 2013 begins, I notice plenty of commentary about mobile devices but less talk about the implications of mobility and other current events on business network and application monitoring and management requirements.

I see two key trends impacting network and application monitoring and management in the coming year: Fast, cheap connectivity and virtualization/cloud services . In this post, I’ll focus on the first of those — connectivity, which is most apparent in the current push toward (you guessed it) mobility.

Chicken or egg: Mobility ↔ connectivity
These days, your employees’ desktop functions are shifting to increasingly powerful mobile devices . At the same time, cloud services make the connectivity of those devices pretty much ubiquitous. So the value of much of your traditional infrastructure diminishes because it costs too much, is too complex, takes up too much space — and, too often, it doesn’t get the job done anymore.

Today’s push to mobility is largely driven by the inexorable human urge to collaborate both economically and socially. But it takes an entirely new scale of connectivity to make this possible.

And that scale is impressive. As per-bit prices have plummeted, today’s wider wire and cable bandwidths have produced huge increases in core and peripheral network capacity. Likewise, wireless speeds have accelerated tremendously (e.g., 4G, 802.11n). As a result, mobile devices of all sorts can access the Internet from almost anywhere via technologies such as assorted varieties of 802.11, WiMAX, 3G, NFC, UWB, LTE, and Bluetooth.

No-compromise network & app management for less hassle
But more than your (and your employees’) mobile devices benefit from this explosion of connectivity. Faster, cheaper universal connectivity also means off-site infrastructure (such as what cloud services provide) and remote services that support on-site infrastructure are now truly viable alternatives to their often cumbersome in-house predecessors. In some cases, these new cloud and remote services are even preferable.

That’s because, first of all, using off-site infrastructure and remote services does not compromise network or application performance.

Second, the right cloud and remote services save you the hassles of mastering their complexity, integrating and maintaining their disparate elements, and supporting the employees and sometimes even the customers who rely on them in what has become a non-stop, 24/7 operational environment.

You may already be experiencing some of the various ways the confluence of mobility, connectivity, and collaboration is forcing your business to change how you handle network and server/application management and monitoring.

In my next post, I’ll get into that other trend I mentioned — virtualization and cloud services— and its impact on monitoring and managing your network, servers, and applications.

Meet the Author
Tim Burke is the President and CEO of Quest. He has been at the helm for over 30 years.
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