RIYADH – The Campus network is the entry point and the main communications/information conduit for most organizations. Massive increases in access demand for increasingly diverse and demanding applications (such as video and data), is stretching legacy campus networks to breaking point. This is giving senior IT staff in Saudi Arabia a big challenge amid an increased uptake in the region of unified communications (UC), virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), and a determined transition to hosted cloud-enabled services and things start getting ugly. Besides, poor reception on calls or video conferences, loss of connectivity, holes in network security, and a lack of adequate bandwidth-reducing application response to a crawl is impacting business productivity and reducing businesses' ability to compete at a time when efficiency gains and maximizing IT assets are critical to combating a negative economic environment, an industry executive said. Sufian Dweik, regional manager, MENA at Brocade, said that a lack of vendor innovation and investment into campus technologies has historically left businesses with limited choices in addressing the impending crunch-point. Many have already invested heavily in applications, hardware upgrades, and hosted services. And trying to shift the problem out to a cloud-service won't work when the problem resides in the campus-indeed any organization looking to invest in, and transition to, cloud-enabled services should ensure their own campus networks can support such changes to get any value from their contracts. For some time, value and cost have been at opposing ends of IT's financial-reality/ business-need see-saw when it comes to campus. This is one of the reasons why the campus remains a critical bottle-neck in adopting innovation that can drive real business change and growth. Campus environments have become extremely complex to manage, or remain basic and unable to reliably carry the volume and types of data common to most business IT environments today. A new approach is needed, one that recognizes the inherent value of the campus to the business, and balances that with the financial realities of IT investment. With new innovations and a new approach to campus design, this is more than possible. Businesses can transition their campus networks to technologies that deliver the intelligence, smooth and seamless ease of use, high-availability, and the resilience their evolving businesses require-and at a cost that challenges all comers. It's something Brocade calls "Effortless Networking". To maintain or gain competitive advantage-and deliver the efficiency and productivity gains all organizations are seeking-value and price cannot remain at opposite ends. Adding switches to an environment just adds cost and complexity for minimal increase in value or effectiveness. Businesses need to look beyond this kind of strategy and reconsider their campus approach. Only by investing in innovative solutions that deliver real immediate improvements, and enable simplicity of management to ensure new applications and updates can be deployed quickly and with ease, and which offer investment protection and longevity over an on-going 'box add' model, are businesses really going to be able to leverage the business value of their campus networks. “When innovation means cost is no longer a key consideration, IT and business no longer need to collide,” Dweik noted. – SG
