Steve Turner, VP of IT Optimisation at Intergence, describes five IT trends that he believes will take off in 2013.
- End User Experience analysis
The End User Experience (UX) is fast becoming a more important performance indicator for businesses than analysing metrics, measurements or other key performance indicators. Although subjective and liable to change, user experience is all about how users perceive the performance of an application or service they are using. ‘Cold’ metrics such as delay, jitter and loss are symptomatic of user performance issues, but do not tell the whole story. It could be described as the difference between gut feeling and facts and figures. Employees with good user experience of their business applications will be much more productive than those who have a poor user experience. - Application control
As the corporate WAN becomes an ever increasing battleground for bandwidth between applications, there is a pressing need to ensure that business critical applications - such as a bank's transaction processing system, a customer service helpline or an airline's booking system - are protected from non-business critical, bandwidth-hungry applications. Increasingly, application performance profiles will be introduced to satisfy an organisation's security policy requirements and to reflect the needs of the users. - Application acceleration
There are situations where bandwidth alone cannot improve application performance and latency becomes a key bottleneck on even the largest of links. Many existing application protocols, such as those which govern the FTP of large files between corporate networks , are not optimised for deployment across the WAN; hence it can be highly effective to optimise these applications for transmission across high latency links with long delays to improve performance. - Cloud-based optimisation
With more businesses requiring that their services be accessible anywhere, CIOs are increasingly looking towards cloud based solutions, including Software as a Service (SaaS), to provide the performance, scalability and accessibility many users demand. This really drives the ‘office anywhere’ concept allowing users to be truly mobile, taking their office with them anywhere they have access to the Internet. Users from around the world can work collaboratively and efficiently on a single task through via central service portal without the need to be in the same room together. - Data Centre consolidation
To improve efficiency, reduce operational costs and optimise application flows, many companies are now actively consolidating their Data Centres, where they once were promoting the growth of new ones. Companies may find themselves with three or four data centres through acquisitions that add new domains to their network and they may decide it’s easier in the short-term to leave them operational. Every individual data centre has to be staffed with facilities engineers, computer operators, system administrators and other specialists, while excess capacity has to be maintained to handle spikes in demand. All of these factors add to costs and inefficiencies.
About Dr Steven Turner
Steven Turner is the VP of IT Optimisation at Intergence. He specialises in Network Optimisation and has successfully completed a large number of optimisation projects for clients in both the public and private sector. Steve is Cisco CCNA and CCNA security certified and is currently studying CCNP. Steve has a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Warwick, and an MSc in Network Systems from the University of Sunderland. He has also completed a PhD using genetic algorithms in conjunction with parallel processing to produce a multi-utility network optimisation tool.
About Intergence
Intergence is an independent IT Consultancy and Professional Services firm, headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with a regional office in the Middle East (Dubai, UAE). Privately Owned, Intergence was founded in 2003 to address the growing requirements of clients demanding high-level impartial expertise in networks and IT. Our close relationship with the Cambridge academic community enables us to innovate in partnership, rapidly incorporating the latest technology advances into our solutions.
Intergence are experts in IT Optimisation, specialising in areas such as application, infrastructure and data centre optimisation. We provide Consulting Services to align IT to your business strategy; Resourcing to provide highly skilled expertise and Managed Services to deliver challenging IT projects on time and to budget. Utilising a unique combination of world class expertise, industry-leading methodology and unique tools, Intergence has a clear and common purpose - to allow our clients to extract more value from their existing assets, whilst delivering a first-class service.
For more information, please visit: www.intergence.com
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