CAIRO, Egypt, 13th July, 2015:
However organization’s goals are measured — by market share, cost
savings, shareholder returns, or customer satisfaction - they all have
one thing in common: Restrictive IT. Organizations in Egypt cannot take
the risk of not addressing restrictive technology, absorbing the growing
cost, and mitigating the impact of a failing network.
Yarob Sakhnini,
regional director, MEMA at Brocade says that the Chief Information
Officer (CIO) is the broker between the needs of the business, the
demands of the business units, the reality of the technology in place,
and the budget required to get where the business wants to be.
Restrictive IT makes
this a difficult balancing act. You can see how it prevents business
goals from being achieved and inhibits business units’ ability to
respond to opportunities and risks, but it is often just too complex and
costly to replace.
Information, data, and the applications that employees and customers use today aren’t just business tools, they are
business. Organizations have become less reliant on the physical -
office spaces, retail outlets, product samples; and more reliant on the
virtual – remote working, web sites and online shopping. However, when
it comes to the network infrastructure, enterprises still rely on
decades old physical infrastructures that are slow, costly, rigid, and
unwieldy.
Sakhnini says that
organizations need to be fast and agile to act on opportunities or to
counter all risks. The physical infrastructures they have in place can’t
support this. The virtualization of technology in response to the
virtualization of the business has only highlighted and increased the
pressure on the infrastructure.
The Impact on CIOs and their Organizations
According to a recent
CIO survey commissioned by Brocade, 98 percent of CIOs admit they are
worried about how they can enable their organization to remain or become
more competitive. Two thirds are concerned about supporting
organizational growth geographically or in employee numbers.
These issues often
stem from problems such as patchy security updates, an inability to
deploy new applications at the speed required, and challenges in
enabling access to services, applications and systems via multiple
devices. All of it is caused by the limiting effect of restrictive IT.
Old, inflexible
infrastructures and lengthy time to deploy have left many business units
within enterprises feeling there’s no choice but to step outside or
around the IT department to meet their goals. The result is Shadow IT.
It includes any deployment or use of technology devices, solutions or
services not sanctioned by IT and any they may be completely ignorant
of. Over 80 percent of CIOs believe business units will adopt Cloud
services without IT’s involvement in the future.
Security breaches and
failure to comply with data protection and management regulation are two
of the most common results of Shadow IT. Over 71 percent of CIOs report
“security issues” as a major factor in time spent reacting to problems
instead of creating solutions.
Balancing Risk: Time to Talk About the Network
It’s likely that CIOs
already know what is the most restrictive IT asset in your organization.
In spite of significant advances in networking technology, in most
organizations the legacy systems they have in place cannot support the
business needs of today, let alone tomorrow.
Costly, complex, but vital, old style network architectures have
resisted attempts to improve their performance through the application
of virtualization or the deployment of more network devices.
While business units
in many organizations race to embrace the cloud as a seemingly viable
work around, a complete transfer of the organizations data, services,
communications and applications is unlikely to be feasible. The only way
forward is to address the network issue. Only by building a solution
that provides the agility, security and access to the organization’s
needs, can goals be met while reducing exposure to risk.
Sakhnini concludes by
saying that simply adding new solutions to an overburdened,
under-utilized, and fundamentally flawed system won’t provide the
organization with what it needs. A new approach to the old network is
needed. One that encompasses financing and transitional technology,
while reducing complexity and cost. Organizations today have an ‘old IP’
infrastructure – systems, methodology, and a design that is no longer
effective. What is needed is a “New IP” - transitional solutions that
when brought together provide an infrastructure that is agile,
affordable, and automated.
