By Saar Gillai, VP Advanced Technology and CTO, HP Networking
Your personal experience at home is changing with an increased use of rich media such as sharing photos in the cloud, connecting to your friends via Facebook to watching your favorite TV shows on your iPad. Consumers have been able to digitize their personal life and now they want to have those same experiences in the workplace.
To accommodate this shift, your IT staff will be challenged to keep up with the translation of employee’s personal expectations into their work environment. Additional stress is added to an organization’s network with the need to keep up with today’s digital life, which requires more flexibility and bandwidth requirements to support new content and applications.
Let me break down the five key trends that will continue to move through organizations like a volcano on the brink of erupting—putting strain on your network’s flexibility and bandwidth:
1. Mobility
This is no surprise. Our modern workplace is no longer the office. It is an always-on, 24x7 workforce connected globally through the Internet. The new virtual workplace is powered by collaboration tools, mobile devices and cloud-based services. IT is challenged by our high mobility lifestyle to support every new mobile device and collaboration solution used by the remote worker, including personal cell phones, tablets, Skype, etc.
Working at a global company, I want to be able to use my mobile device to access any service, anywhere and anytime—with the ability to access information with one easy touch. Therefore, IT has to move away from a rigid perimeter at the network entry point to a more flexible network architecture with the right level of security at different levels to provide better support for seamless access to services for the mobile workforce.
2. Consumerization of IT
The consumerization of IT, in conjunction with Internet access and the proliferation of mobile devices, is a cultural wave that is unstoppable, and we are only at the beginning. Let’s face it. We are spoiled by having a rich media environment at home with easy access to user-friendly web services like Facebook, rich multimedia experiences like YouTube and online services such as video chat with high bandwidth. Now when I go to the office, I often have to log in through multiple systems to access business applications such as CRM, which can be slow and ultimately frustrating. Yet at home, with usually one touch, I can get my bank account information to easily do transfers and pay some bills.
So what has changed? At home there is no legacy system to deal with. Home users are not shackled like large IT organizations. In the work environment, IT was my only service provider in the past, but today I can easily access services on my own through cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS). In fact, accessing and using these services is often much *faster* than going through my IT department. Another key aspect of consumerization of IT is that people expect to wirelessly connect to their devices anywhere. The Ethernet jack is gong way. Tables don’t’ even have an Ethernet port.
Also heating up and adding another layer of demand on IT is BYOD, or “bring your own device.” BYOD is beginning to gain popularity with consumers that have more sophisticated devices at home that they want to use at work, too. In meetings, I would personally prefer to use my tablet to jot down notes.
This places a new set of challenges on IT, which needs to find ways to securely provide employees with access to the appropriate applications on devices they don’t ultimately “control.”
3. Pace of change
Every second, something new happens that will have some effect on us. A new innovation, an online game, a new device--something that makes your life different.
Computer pioneer Alan Kay once said that new technology is anything that was invented after you were born. This highlights how technology is constantly innovating. My five- and six-year-old kids are growing up with the iPad and other digital devices, while I thought color television was an innovation. The people entering the workforce now have grown up on Google, Facebook and YouTube. They expect those types of services and tools in the workplace. It’s not new technology to them or anything special. Yet in many cases we still consider these innovations.
The Internet has knocked down barriers to innovation and speed globally. It’s contributing to more innovation everywhere in the world today than it has ever been, demonstrating a faster pace of change. Before the web, the barrier of innovation was much higher. With universal access to technology and tools through the Internet, innovation is accelerating because it’s much easier to create solutions and products. For example somebody in India can build an application using a cloud provider and in a week can be up and running providing services to the world.
The web and technology will continue to evolve with a key focus on how people are communicating and collaborating. Therefore you can only expect more load on the network in the future. I will also add, in order to maintain a competitive edge, you have to move faster than your competition. No rest for the weary. And if you take a step back, what is happening today seems fast but it sets the baseline for the next 10 years of accelerated competition.
4. Globalization meets centralization
Think of the places you spend most of your time online, like Facebook, Twitter and Google. I call these central hubs where the majority of the people hang out. When the web gained popularity, there was a thought that there would be a explosion in the diversity of offerings and this would lead a huge segmentation of audience. However, it turns out that most people want to hang out where others are. Human nature says to choose what others do, simply because they’re perceived to be a safe choice, which is why these central hubs are so popular.
Today, people are looking at scale in a much bigger dimension. The concept of scale has changed. Scale used to be a city or country but now it’s the whole world. When Facebook or Google or Amazon thinks about scale, they don’t just look at the users in the U.S., they look at what percentage of the worldwide population they have to accommodate.
When you have billions of people around the world following a few key trends or channels on the Internet, you are likely to encounter network and application pressure points. For the infrastructure, this means you need both geographic diversity and the ability to handle much larger loads than before—by building bigger data center and/or having bursting capability to leverage the cloud.
5. Prevalence of the cloud
We’ve been talking about the cloud for years now. Recently, however, I’m hearing customers’ conversations shift from the relevancy or “if” to adopt cloud to “how” to implement cloud. The concept of the cloud is gaining adoption with enterprises as well as consumer services. Users can now roll out mainstream applications both in public and private cloud environments. I feel strongly that cloud innovation will continue to evolve over time and as a disruptive technology in the industry. It will only continue to improve and innovate as well as garner wider adoption.
As part of the webification of applications and evolution of the cloud, applications are increasingly distributed across multiple compute and data resources. This leads to the network (or fabric) becoming an increasingly integral part of both application enablement and delivery. To support this evolution, we will continue to see pressure on the network to become more like a fabric, providing more non blocking bandwidth, large scale, better policy enforcement (like multitenancy) and more flexibility
Onward
Our IT world is in a sea of change due to these trends. Networking has to evolve to be more agile and service oriented. To address these changes, customers will need to focus less on managing infrastructure and more on connecting users to services.
Want to learn more about how to move towards this paradigm? Let’s start the conversation here.
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