Networks Do Matter – Really!

Jerry Caron

Summary Bullets:              

• Networks and networking suffer from a lack of respect that defies logic.
• Innovation continues apace, however, the industry often fails to give these advances the attention they deserve.

Networks and the stuff that make them work are suffering from a dearth of respect to which even Rodney Dangerfield would have to defer. Sure, we all know that it is lunacy to dismiss the value of both private and public networks because the quality of experience is utterly dependent on the quality of the network connections. This is a stone-cold fact, whether we are talking about a teenager looking at YouTube videos on a smartphone, or a business running mission-critical applications.

Yet while networks and networking have never been truly glamorous, there is a perceptible downward trend in love for the stuff of connectivity. It has long been the case, for example, that the hottest, most admired Internet businesses take public and private networks for granted and ride roughshod over them with something approaching complete disdain. If Facebook is sluggish, you don’t blame Facebook, do you?.

Out of the Shadows: Making a Decentralized Approach to IT for Business

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• Flexibility is one of the prime benefits of a cloud-based IT consumption model, giving IT and non-technical employees capacity when they need it.  This access to resources enables organizations to execute new projects quickly and respond to fast-changing market dynamics.
• This appealing model has risks for the IT organization – issues around manageability and control are a natural byproduct of shadow IT.

While cost reductions are often the main driver for cloud adoption today, elasticity and accessibility distinguishes cloud from traditional methods. Organizations of many sizes gravitate toward the cloud to make it easier for individual business units and employees to tap IT resources to support organizational goals. Cloud can facilitate a more improvisational approach to technology and project management, allowing even non-technical users to dial up and down server and storage capacity for short term or cyclical projects.