Cloud shift costs slowing physical infrastructure spend
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Cloud shift costs slowing physical infrastructure spend

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While the shift to a multi-cloud environment is hailed as the future of enterprise, the costs associated with building virtual infrastructure have caused “refresh and upgrade patterns to slow”, increasing the number of devices and programmes with vulnerabilities.

Further, several trends are converging to accelerate the issue, according to the NTT 2020 Global Network Insights report. The pace of technological advance over recent years has driven the volume of obsolete assets in an organisation from 13.1% in 2017 to 47.9% currently. Leading the way, in the tech sector 69.9% of all assets were either ageing or obsolete in 2019. This multiplies the vulnerabilities as obsolete devices have, on average, twice as many vulnerabilities per device (42.2) when compared with ageing (26.8) and current devices (19.4).

Rob Lopez, executive vice president, intelligent infrastructure, NTT Ltd., said: “We found that organisations have already been sweating their network infrastructure while increasing their investments in cloud-based services. Many businesses will choose to continue to sweat assets whereas others will see the need, if not be forced, to revisit or review their network architecture, operating and support models.”

Covid-19 has also played a part, with the continued surge in bandwidth consumption straining networks. Lopez added said: “We expect to see strategy shift from a focus on business continuity to preparation for the future as lockdown begins to ease. Network infrastructure needs to be appropriately architected and managed to deal with unplanned surges, which will require a relook at cloud and on-premises infrastructure to reduce the impact and frequency of business-critical outages.”

In its study, NTT assessed more than 1,000 clients globally and analysed more than 800,000 devices across multiple sectors over a five-year period. In the most successful organisations, it noted networks are already being used to pursue new business models in IoT and robotic process automation, “as part of digital transformation initiatives to save cost and scale services in an agile manner”

Lopez continued: “The network is the platform for business digital transformation. It needs to be ubiquitous, flexible, robust and secure to adapt easily to business change, while increasing the maturity of the operational support environment. Businesses that use a high-level of network automation and intelligence to optimize operations will gain a significant competitive advantage and realise the benefits of the cloud economy, securely.”

 

 

 

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