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elcome back to PBC Technologies. We are continuing our series on Network Infrastructure and today will be looking at some of the challenges and direction of networking infrastructure in business today and in the future.

As businesses update their IT infrastructure, they face many obstacles, including existing infrastructure, poor system integration and an overall lack of technical skills by employees in the workforce.

An outdated network gets in the way of business, but a modern infrastructure adapts, helping IT pros keep pace with business needs. “If our infrastructure doesn’t keep up, our vision for where the world is going won’t be realized,” said Manoj Manoharan, director of product marketing for Ethernet services at Comcast Business, during a panel discussion on the future of networking at the Interop 2017 conference.

Network infrastructure is at the center of a revolution

This is taking place in enterprise legacy data centers, especially concerning migration to the cloud or adopting a hybrid cloud model. The change is making its way through all levels of the stack, from infrastructure to applications.
If a company’s network is not ready, a migration to the cloud can end up costing the business precious time and cost far more in the long term.

To create a modern and responsive infrastructure, IT teams have virtualized data center infrastructure, from servers to storage and networking. When combined with analytics, virtualization helps the network optimize its performance and ability to handle any sort of increase in demand.

Hardware is largely becoming Virtualized

As hardware becomes virtualized and programmable through software, IT teams need the skills to enable integration – and the hardware needs to be able to integrate. How IT professionals choose their tools and design there IT environments to be automated, virtualized, programmable, secure and scalable will surely be the difference between success and failure.

A modern Network Infrastructure should allow for scale, easy integration into the current infrastructure and be able to be rapidly maintained. When planned and deployed correctly a proper network infrastructure can be a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Whether from faster data transfer speeds, less downtime and maintenance or lower investment costs down the line to scale, a company’s network infrastructure can either be a highway on the road map to success or a bottleneck that hinders performance and becomes a roadblock to growth.

Radical transformation driven by data

As businesses rely more on data to make decisions, and the inputs of data increase (think IoT) the way companies handle and transfer that data is going to be critical to mission success. With data becoming like digital oil which power big business machines, network infrastructure is the pipeline that handle the transfers.

The demand for Structured Cabling will soar in the coming years, primarily because of the growing requirement for high network speeds and bandwidth, on account of the growing consumption of data and operation of various bandwidth-intensive applications by businesses around the world.

Ryan Moore

Check back with us for the third installment of our network infrastructure and the takeover of business series. When you are planning your next project reach out to PBC Technologies to deploy a future forward Networking Infrastructure Solution for you.