Surviving and thriving with adaptive networks

For essentially all organisations, increasing global influence is a reality. Even organisations that seem to operate only locally are affected deeply by the global nature of communications and commerce. This fact is apparent in the corporate world. And in the public sector, new expectations are being placed on government and educational institutions, causing tremendous pressure to execute. The rate of change in a business or organisational environment might feel like a Darwinian struggle – meaning competition for survival, is fierce. The question is, will a business adapt quickly, efficiently and effectively enough to thrive within this relentless pace of change?

Alaa Alshimy is general manager for HP Procurve Middle East

It is commonly accepted today that the right IT can be crucial in making people and processes more effective. You must always be concerned about managing complexity effectively, about the burdens associated with regulatory compliance, about embracing the applications that best support your business processes and about minimising operational costs. Less commonly understood, however, is the importance of the right network infrastructure. Too often, even IT-savvy executives make the mistake of treating a network as simply a ‘pipe’ for moving data around. In an era of fast-paced global competition, this limited approach to networking can put you an enterprise at a disadvantage.

More IT intelligence is migrating to the network, which now assumes a key role in driving every aspect of IT – and therefore an organisation’s business processes. The ideal network infrastructure ensures that information assets remain secure from internal and external attacks, boosts productivity, and is easy to configure, operate and maintain – allowing executives to focus on their core business goals.

In a rapidly evolving climate, you need to constantly deploy new capabilities as they become affordable, and before your competitors do. To gracefully embrace change, you must focus on always learning, improving, refining – in a word, adapting.

When change is pervasive, holding on to the status quo is often not the safe or the prudent choice. In fact, what appears to be the safe choice, for example vendors that promise to ‘do it all’, might actually be enormously risky from an adaptability standpoint, limiting one’s ability to respond to a constantly changing business environment. Customers might suffer from proprietary vendor lock-ins that restrict future choice and flexibility, or might end up stuck with outdated, underperforming equipment.

This perspective applies strongly to networks, which are crucial to all communications, connection, commerce, and ultimately, competitiveness. According to Gartner analysts Mark Fabbi and Bob Hafner, IT will waste an estimated US$100 billion over the next five years by overspending on network products and services.

The key to avoiding such overspending is to invest in the right products and services. For organisations to evolve successfully, that means investing in solutions that enable their networks to adapt rapidly to whatever changes they may face. In order to gain critical competitive advantage, an organisation’s network needs to address the following seven key issues:

– Keeping information assets secure
– Optimising business processes for current business conditions, while ensuring that the processes are flexible enough to evolve as conditions inevitably change
– Enhancing IT return on investment (ROI) by fixing areas of inefficiency that threatens to drag businesses down
– Deploying the applications that will enable your organisation to grow and thrive
– Making critical information readily accessible to your workers, as and when they need it, to increase efficiency
– Always focusing on communicating: internally and externally
– Making sure your network aids efforts to achieve and document compliance with regulations

A network that addresses these issues becomes a strategic asset for an organisation, and is known as an adaptive network. With an adaptive network, organisations can focus on their core business, so you become and remain competitive within the rapidly evolving global ecosystem. Your network infrastructure becomes a strategic asset helping you thrive and compete. Users get seamless access to the information and resources they need to be most effective – while organisations effectively keep critical information, resources and assets always available over the network, secure from unauthorised users and safe from virus attacks.

Because an adaptive network vision in based on an open network infrastructure, organisations can easily add and integrate new applications, technologies and capabilities into their IT environment without fear that existing infrastructure will become obsolete, and without having to retrain their staff. And as your organisation evolves and grows, so does your network – ensuring the most costeffective solutions and best return on investment.

In a world of frenetic change, organisations must evolve rapidly to become and remain competitive. Crucial to this evolution is the ability to harness networks to be nimble and responsive to change – and to take full advantage of the competitive opportunities presented by change to become even more efficient and even more effective. It is in an organisation’s best interests to question the status quo and continually look at alternatives to ‘business as usual’. This is especially true with networks, which are crucial to communicating, connecting and competing.

Successful organisations will be those that can respond to change with the most agility and grace. They will have an adaptive network that is a long-term strategic asset and that they can harness to do things not even imagined in the past. HP ProCurve Networking has a bold vision for adaptive networks: open, cohesive, highly available networks that automatically fortify security, increase productivity and reduce complexity by being adaptive to users, to applications and to an organisations goals.

By enabling organisations to understand, anticipate and respond optimally to change, and therefore compete more effectively, adaptive networks become crucial strategic assets helping them to survive and thrive.