Close this panel
Putting cloud computing into perspective 
Computacenter’s end-to-end services and solutions and current promotions.
All the latest news, updates and financial results from Computacenter.
The latest IT industry news, stories and media comment.
Customer case studies and articles: Computacenter solving customer challenges.
Stand and deliver
As new performance-hungry business applications put corporate networks under increased pressure, organisations need to ensure their infrastructure is ready to meet expectations.
The importance of the network is being reset and, perhaps for the first time, there will be an irrefutable and very public link between the network and the business.
Users, who cared little about the network as long as email was working, will now be questioning why they can’t deliver 1,000 transactions per second. They’ll ask why they can’t use TelePresence conferencing instead of jumping on a flight.
And increasingly they’ll be confused as to why they can share video and photos over Facebook, but don’t seem to have the bandwidth to do the same in their professional lives.
Colin Williams, Computacenter’s Networking and Security Practice Leader, comments: “The reality of the next 12 months is that we will see a raft of new highly complex and performance-hungry business applications – and their success will be entirely predicated on the network’s ability to support them.”
Under pressure to perform
The growing importance of the network is widely recognised, as demonstrated by a recent survey by Loudhouse Research, in which three quarters of IT heads cite the network as being central to their IT strategies.
Despite this growing importance, less than half of network planners consider performance as a major issue – citing security as the number one challenge instead. This is in stark contrast to the 69 percent of users who rated network performance as the biggest concern.
Performance also featured low down on the priority list for driving network optimisation programmes. Fifty-eight percent of respondents rated cost reduction as the main business priority with less than a third citing increased performance as the prime driver.
A virtual challenge
As well as ensuring the network can meet user expectations and support new services – from socio- professional networking to real-time video collaboration – organisations also need to ensure they have sufficient bandwidth for their virtualisation projects.
According to the research, a staggering 88 percent of companies think their network is an obstruction to their virtualisation journey. Perhaps because nearly seven out of ten respondents underestimated the number of network issues arising during deployment.
“As your business and IT infrastructure grows and evolves, your network needs to evolve with it,” comments Colin. “Organisations therefore need to transform their network infrastructures into resilient and future-ready platforms to enable optimal performance and the ability to respond to frequently changing business demands.”
Computacenter has helped a number of companies optimise their network infrastructures using technologies such as 10Gb Ethernet, network traffic optimization, virtualization to deliver critical business services and applications. For example, we worked with Harvey Nichols to enhance the customer experience through the implementation of a new unified communications infrastructure.
“With an optimised network, organisations can consolidate infrastructure, thereby reducing the IT management burden – and associated overheads,” comments Colin. “An optimised, high-performance network will also act as an enabler of change within the organisation, leading to increased business agility and improved end user and customer satisfaction.”
Read about how networking neglect is putting business success risk
Download your copy of the research findings in our whitepaper
Find out how Harvey Nichols freed up staff time and IT budget with networking project