With the developments of technology and the rapid rate that employees are adapting to these, enterprises need to ensure that they are keeping up to date with communication advancements, writes RAVIN NAIDU of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.
From the BYOD phenomenon, as well as mobility and the move to the cloud, businesses are forced to create an environment where users have access anywhere, any time and with any device.
Although it has been a slow adoption, I have noticed that corporations have identified that by giving freedom and flexibility to employees, they are empowering and motivating them to explore and adopt new applications that could potentially assist the individual’s work performance. In my opinion, the biggest IT challenge in this implementation is managing the application experience versus what the data centre is able to manage and process.
As we are leading providers of enterprise communications solutions and services, we understand that network intelligence, agility and scalability are no longer an option but rather a requirement. In a market that is heading towards an application-aware environment, we have introduced a highly intelligent and dynamically adaptive technology known as the Application Fluent Network. It is the backbone of new business and communication models which delivers an exceptional user experience for real-time applications to any device, at any location.
With business units putting huge pressure on IT to embrace BYOD and the continuous adoption of new applications, IT departments have raised concerns about keeping the network secure and ensuring that application invasion does not consume every network resource which could have a damaging effect on the delivery of business critical applications. It is therefore immensely important for businesses to deploy a solution that has analytics and programmability capabilities. This avoids conflicts between the business and IT departments and enables them to work in synergy to achieve their business objectives.
Because today’s networks are complex with various physical paths, application traffic doesn’t always take the optimal path which could potentially lead to intermittent and application performance. In order to trouble shoot and resolve issues quickly, enterprises need to consider application software and hardware to analyse the issues and faults in a reasonable time frame. Our Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 6860 family of Stackable LAN Switches, OmniAccess Wireless LAN Controller and OmniVista 2500 provide the IT administrator with tools for the continuous monitoring of the network to keep up with evolving network needs, providing the means to fine-tune the network for optimal operations and cost efficiencies. Businesses have started to identify that technology adoption is integral in reaching business objectives.
* Ravin Naidu, Regional Director Southern Africa for ALE, marketed under the brand Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.