Organisations that operate over very large geographical areas have traditionally spent very large sums of money on network architecture that would barely service the needs of the business. Today, organisations are faced with many challenges including increasing bandwidth demands, market expansion, and budgets constraints.

For businesses to grow, investment made in technology needs to produce much higher returns. Fortunately, the Internet has come of age and network managers are now able to align network architecture more closely to business requirement. With ISP offerings such as Metro Ethernet, companies can interconnect remote offices at much faster and reliable speeds, thereby broadening the scope of services available.

The integration of fibre has also allowed businesses to leverage applications more effectively. For example, a small office that may be located in a remote area would have serious issues accessing an application hosted on a server hundreds of kilometres away. With carrier Ethernet, network managers can now design network architecture with much more flexibility, minus constraints of relying on expensive, underperforming solutions.

Products like Metro Ethernet offer advantages such as:

• High-Speed Data: Higher data throughput implies improved performance in almost all aspects where business and technology meet.
• Application Utilisation: Accessing applications and company information from centralised data centres is no longer a slow and painful experience for staff and results in higher productivity.
• Voice over IP: Without stronger and more reliable backbones, technologies such as VOIP may have seen a much longer delay in becoming the technology of choice.
• Video and Presentation: Businesses can now save on travelling and accommodation costs for employees by having virtual meetings with colleagues who are considerable distances away. Media and content sharing today occurs without even giving it a second thought.
• Agility: Network managers now have agility in designing their environments. The ability to combine technologies in a way that caters to your needs was once a luxury for IT departments with massive budgets.
• Innovation: Internet speeds exponentially faster than a few years ago, means businesses can utilise mobile technology more efficiently, develop web-based applications and improve overall business function considerably.

Network architecture around your needs                   

Today, network-design is no longer burdened by the problem of scarcity. Whatever your network architecture requirements, you can find a solution to your needs by combining different topologies and products that will serve your specific goal. This is great for multi-national corporations with large-scale enterprises. The global standardisation efforts also mean that organisations can expand their businesses effectively across borders.

Few things are more fruitless than trying to get old technology to do new things. We certainly have come a very long way since the good old days of dial-up – an era IT pros would prefer to forget.

Image credit: Flinders