GIG+ SPEEDSFUELING TODAY’S HIGH-CAPACITY,HIGH-BANDWIDTH BUSINESS NEEDS

Enterprises that strive to take advantage of the digital economy by doubling down on cloud applications, big data analytics, mobility and video need to ensure they have the network scale to support these dynamic applications, and that the network starts with Gigabit-plus speeds.

Ask any enterprise about its biggest opportunities and challenges around IT and you will hear common themes: cloud, collaboration, mobility, big data and video. In many instances, several or all of these technologies intersect in enterprise IT projects and have C-level and boardroom visibility. This forces IT to invest heavily in people and process to ensure that projects deliver the desired business results.

Concurrently, project leadership is slowly transitioning from developers and architects to business unit leaders. Too frequently, these leaders place greater emphasis on the software stack and radically underestimate the value of deploying a mission-critical and high-capacity network. The price of not investing in high-capacity Gigabit-plus networking will become steep as additional workloads that once resided only within the enterprise transition to the cloud.

Below are the top 4 trends that will drive enterprises to upgrade their bandwidth:

1 CLOUD, CLOUDS AND MORE CLOUDS

All trends point to the snowball e� ect in cloud adoption. Gartner Inc. predicts that the market for public cloud services will grow to $131 billion by 2017. Deployment of private clouds — both on premise and externally hosted — continues to grow strongly for non-native cloud applications. Hybrid cloud deployments will marry both environments and encourage portability with application programming interfaces (APIs) and orchestration tools. Enterprises of all sizes will continue to access their applications through secured, public-facing web portals.

This portability will enable the ability to target a specifi c workload to a specifi c cloud provider for a set period of time. This is the future of the cloud economy, but enterprises must also ensure that they manage IT outside of their own four walls. The majority of enterprises will move the following workloads between public and private clouds using public and private networks:

S U M M A R Y

By Ted Chamberlin

TOP FOUR BANDWIDTH DRIVERS

▶ Cloud Computing

▶ Video

▶ Mobility

▶ Big Data

▶ Development and testing: This is the domain of developers who are tasked with creating new applications for the business; these workloads require lower levels of security but higher levels of scaling.

▶ Batch processing: Historically created by mainframes, big data and high-performance computing consumes massive compute and storage cycles; this requires higher levels of data processing, but only for a short duration.

▶ Enterprise applications: Software as a service continues to grow, but most enterprises continue to run HR, fi nance and other ERP applications on premise. This requires highly available, high-performance environments with modest levels of virtualization and scaling.

▶ Cloud-native applications: Applications “born in the cloud” require lower compute and IOP but rely heavily on high-performance connections and dynamic interoperability between multiple discrete systems.

For most enterprises, this represents a major shift in the way they deliver and support applications for their employees and customers; the boundary of an enterprise wide area network now extends to third-party cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

Recommendation: Don’t bother fi ghting the cloud wave. Designing your network architecture to be “cloud ready” will become the norm and require investment in higher capacity ports to support the spiky requirements of cloud workloads.

2 VIDEO (THE NEW VOICE)

Video continues to be a growing, bandwidth-hungry application confronting most enterprises. Video represents a valuable opportunity for companies to connect with users, deliver compelling user-facing content and reduce travel costs through conferencing and collaboration. YouTube and Vimeo will continue to be the standard platforms for advertising, training and multichannel marketing for big and small enterprises. Concurrently more business collaboration is moving from audio to video conferencing, and the tools being used are becoming more reliant on broadband connectivity. The infrastructure that was previously needed to support room-based conferencing, such as telepresence, was cost-prohibitive, and few enterprises could justify the return on the investment.

Employees are now using cloud-based conferencing with devices they bring into the enterprise. These meetings are scheduled ad hoc or just in time, which can throw curve balls at the enterprise networks. This shift away from voice to video networks, paired with increased adoption of ultra-high-resolution 4k video, will challenge even the most seasoned network architects.

Recommendation: Capacity and performance are critical to delivering enterprise-grade video.• Ensure your network architecture employs di� erentiated service with a quality

of service that supports video protocols. • Ensure all your network locations have appropriate-sized bandwidth links to

support multiple tra� c types.

The price of not investing in high-capacity Gig+ networkingwill become steep as additional workloads that once resided only within the enterprise transition to the cloud.

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©2015 Charter Communications® Service may not be available in all areas.

Restrictions Apply. Call for details.

Spectrum Business Whitepaper EWP-XXX-01-1510.1-O

3 MOBILE EVERYTHING

The e� ect of mobility on networks is driven by three disruptive trends: mobile and remote working, collaboration, and rich content. Each of these drivers stresses a corporate wide area network; the convergence of all three can create massive bottlenecks and greatly impair application performance. Virtual desktop infrastructure, tablets and smart phones are great productivity tools, but each puts unique demands on network infrastructure.

Recommendation: Mobility and BYOD will create an explosion of devices on the enterprise network, creating an environment of unpredictable and rapidly changing demands. Deployment of IPv6 will be critical to support the scale and unpredictable needs of mobile device connectivity.

4 BIG DATA-DRIVEN ANALYTICS

If yours is like most enterprises, you feel the gravitational pull toward the use of big data analytics to help grow your business. The prospect of harnessing, storing, analyzing and synthesizing large data sets to produce actionable insights captivates most C-level executives.

The problem lies in trying to create a big data strategy, not a business strategy that utilizes big data. Collecting data from sensors and devices has the potential to drive innovation in healthcare, environmental conservation and public safety, but is useless if the information is siloed. Getting the most out of big data analytics will require the use of cloud platforms that support NoSQL databases such as Hadoop and MapReduce.

These database clusters are designed to horizontally scale for quick query, access, and data analysis and management. Moving these data sets between on-premise and cloud databases requires segmented network connectivity that can scale to meet the processing needs of big data sets without compromising the performance of enterprise applications.

Recommendation: Any analytics-driven big data project must map to a business benefi t such as improved customer experience or process e� ciency. When relying on an external cloud platform, ensure your bandwidth can scale to accommodate both bursty and peak-demand activity.

C O N C L U S I O N

As enterprises attempt to di� erentiate their business from their competitors, the ability to exploit cloud-based technologies will be the critical link. However, savvy enterprises will not rush to deploy cloud, video, mobility and big data initiatives without measuring the impact of these applications on their core enterprise network. They will build a foundation for these projects by proactively scaling bandwidth to meet increased network tra� c demands at headquarters, data centers and remote locations.

Do you feel the need for Gigabit-plus speed? Now may be the perfect time to prepare your network for cloud, collaboration, mobility, big data and video.

ABOUTTED CHAMBERLIN

Ted is the principal advisor and analyst for Custom Shop Strategies, a role that brings together his nearly 25 years of experience in and around the technology industry, including a 14-year stint at Gartner Inc., the largest and most infl uential IT industry analyst fi rm. While at Gartner, Ted wrote many of the tech industry’s go-to research reports on managed hosted services, data centers, wide area networking and cloud-based technology. Ted’s work spoke to literally thousands of companies — from startups to Fortune 10 global brands — that relied on his expertise to guide their strategic directions and IT decisions.

After Gartner, Ted held senior product marketing roles in the Cloud Networking Group at Citrix, where he ran product marketing for the Branch Repeater and Cloud Bridge products. Ted was the VP of Cloud Market Development at Coresite, where he developed their cloud go-to-market strategy and partnerships, including the development of a cloud services exchange with partners like AWS, Microsoft and TW Telecom.