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Organisations must treat their network as a utility

The demand for bandwidth just keeps growing, and organisations need to be flexible in their provisioning

Organisations must treat their network as a utility
More data is flowing through networking pipes every year
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Research by NoD's sister site, Computing, has highlighted a significant gap in how often enterprises reexamine their network carrier contracts. While a quarter of businesses do so every year, an equal number only do so every three years; a fact that Luke Braham, IT manager at global staffing agency Red, admitted was "surprising."

"The demand for change [caused by] things like the Internet of Things [and] big data means that connectivity and pipes need to get bigger, so why would you not be renewing every year?" he asked. "Now what I slightly can't understand is we can scale almost everything in our lives, up and down, so why can't we scale the bandwidth to suit, and why can't we just say at any one moment ‘I need more, but I don't need it forever, I just need it for now'?

"So yes, I'm curious. We're a business that's probably 95 per cent in the cloud and everything we have there can be moved around and changed to suit our needs, so why can it not be that our bandwidth can do the same?"

Braham was speaking rhetorically, as Red is a customer of elastic infrastructure specialist Colt. Mike South, a product manager at Colt, added:

"My advice from a carrier perspective...is [that] too many enterprises do accept this status quo. They'll stay with their current carrier, they won't often realise there's a lively market out there, and it's an evolving market. So just because your current provider is offering a more traditional experience, there's a lot of competitive operators out there - like Colt for example. Have a look, go and talk to some different telcos and draw your own conclusions."

Asked if there was anything that companies can be doing to react to this limited bandwidth situation, Braham said, "From a datacentre perspective I think there's some scalability already there, in terms of connectivity - but enterprises and organisations don't have the ability to scale in that sense so, given that the pace of the world changes so quickly these days, businesses change and they grow incredibly quickly.

"I've seen Red grow quite dramatically over the last 18 months and as businesses change so quickly, I think they're finding bottlenecks in technology following suit; so some things in the cloud can move very quickly with them, [and] some things outside the cloud cannot move so quickly. Personally that's what I can see on the face of it. I'm quite lucky in the fact that Red has been able to invest quite heavily in technology so in and outside of the cloud we're able to have some sort of scalability and pay for it as well."

Braham and South made their comments in a Computing websem, which is now available on-demand.

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