We’ve all heard the adage “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Facing leaner IT budgets, many of our prospects and customers are being forced to consider closely what they need from their infrastructure to support the demands of their core businesses. The savvier ones are using this opportunity to rethink the status quo and consider new approaches that might just simplify their lives as well as stretch their network investment dollar.
Networks tend to grow in incremental phases. As a company’s requirements and business drivers evolve, IT departments add on new appliances and applications to fill functionality gaps in their infrastructure. Each individual phase of LAN growth must be separately provisioned, managed, and secured. They also need to interwork –contributing to IT pain. Over time, networks that grow this way can remain cost effective only as long as the behavior of the users remains fairly static—that is, there are not too many moves, adds, and changes and no new surprises.
But in most successful companies today, user behavior is more fluid—because that’s what is required for the core business to remain innovative. Today’s IT departments need the ability to create ad hoc groups to work on projects as required. Some of these groups will include third-party users for temporary amounts of time. Increasingly IT also must support more users working remotely and needing access to corporate resources from home offices and mobile devices. They need clear visibility into application use and audit trails of all different types of users—employees and third parties alike—to demonstrate “who” is doing “what” “when”. The operational burden of provisioning, controlling, and managing access in this type of virtualized organization can threaten the ability of IT to keep up with business demands.
Business innovations are driving companies to extend their corporate networks, and technical innovations are now available to address the challenges this phenomenon creates for IT groups. When IT decides to upgrade its LAN infrastructure, decision-makers are looking at context-driven LAN Switches to address these issues. By using high-powered L7 processing, organizations can gain visibility into traffic forwarding decisions and have the ability to enforce policy for users, applications and devices on the LAN. With visibility and control delivered directly from the LAN infrastructure, IT can now become a contributor to the innovations of the core business and not a victim of them.
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