Embracing ‘The new IP’

Embracing ‘The new IP’ will help organisations in the Middle East boost workforce productivity explains Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director, MEMA at Brocade.

Have you ever given a thought about how bad office internet connectivity and network downtime can hurt organisations in the Middle East?

An interesting study appeared in the UK media recently, showing that 7.5 million working days are being lost in the UK thanks to poor office technology. That’s an average of 11 days per worker in case you’re wondering. 11 days of sitting around, frustrated, because they can’t work – not because they don’t want to.

The biggest culprit? A slow Internet connection. Somewhat embarrassingly half of the office workers surveyed said their home broadband was better than their work connection. Yes even in our hyper connected, online shopping, 10GbE switching world, it seems organisations are still struggling to get their network to, well, work.

If such a survey was carried out in the Middle East, I am willing to bet that the results would not be very different.

It’s not just the workforce that is struggling, as Brocade’s research has shown that your average CIO is losing around 1000 working hours every year firefighting. A leading cause of this drain on their time? Network downtime. And this doesn’t account for all those IT team and helpdesk hours focused on fixing things in order to keep the lights on, rather than working on projects that could make those lights shine so much more brightly – increasing competitiveness, improving efficiency, creating new opportunities and delivering new services to internal and external customers. The real exciting, innovative stuff.

So why not just “fix” the network? Cloud is touted as one solution, and it can certainly deliver impressive cost and service improvements. Unfortunately it’s also of little use if you can’t access your cloud service because you can’t connect to the Internet off your corporate network in the first place. Simply adding more switches to the network is an expensive way of gaining a little more bandwidth for a huge increase in complexity.

So what to do? Well we need to look at the network in a new way. Not as a fixed legacy system that must be held up with sticking plaster or ripped out and replaced. Or as an impractical full scale shift into the cloud. Despite what some vendors may infer, addressing your problems with your network does not have to be an “either/or” deal.

What organizations need to adopt first is a philosophy that we call the New IP. The New IP is not a solution, or a product; it’s an approach that recognises that cloud, mobility, digitalisation, virtualisation, software and hardware all have their role to play in the network that organisations now need and that it’s about working out the right mix of the above for each organisation’s business needs. Like, increasing productivity, for example.

Only when we stop focusing on trying to fix the Old IP and take a business focused approach that embraces the reality of the technology dependent world we inhabit can we fully enable the workforce.