Technology has always been a driver for business growth and competitiveness, but the pace is picking up.
Companies that heavily invested in IT assets between 2006 and 2010 increased productivity three times faster than companies that did not, according to a recent report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
One area of technology that enterprise managers current are eyeing is data center infrastructure.
“Virtualization and automation inside the data center have brought efficiency and flexibility to the enterprise network, streamlining its operations,” noted the recent Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) Enterprise 2014 Global Research whitepaper, “Enterprise Communications in a New PC Era.”
“While automation has dramatically improved performance inside the data center, the network that connects users with applications is also experiencing an evolution. Once the network is upgraded to match the intelligence and efficiency inside the data center, application throughput is dramatically increased.”
Data center efficiency for better cloud service delivery, in particular in the area of data center switching, is currently a key focus for the enterprise.
“The top concerns enterprises have around data centers were the complexity of migration, the complexity of integrating data centers with existing applications and services, and the ability to scale and virtualize the data centers,” explained the Alcatel-Lucent report on the study. “This need to be able to scale and virtualize data centers is driven by migration issues, complexity, integration and budget. Because of the perception of difficulty and costs associated with an upgrade, enterprises want infrequent upgrades and when they must do an upgrade, that it be easy and inexpensive.”
What enterprises are moving toward, found the study, are data center solutions that automate deployment. Innovative data center fabrics such as network functions virtualization are delivering flexible, scalable, highly resilient pay-as-you-grow architectures. Through automation, new requirements placed on the network by virtualized workloads are being addressed by reducing operational complexity. Deployment models such as virtual data centers, multi-site private clouds and hybrid clouds are helping businesses get there.
Technology has always served businesses as a way to draw competitive advantage. That’s not going away any time soon.
Edited by Peter Bernstein