INTELLIGENT DATA CENTRES
Intuitive networks
critical for tomorrow’s
digital business
Osama Al-Zoubi is Chief Technology Officer
at Cisco Middle East.
Built for digital business and Internet of Things, intuitive networks promise a respite for
organisations struggling with legacy networks describes Osama Al-Zoubi at Cisco Middle East.
T
here are an estimated 8.4 billion
connected devices today and
this number is racing ahead to
reach hundreds of billions. According
to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index
forecasts, over 500 billion devices and
objects will be connected by 2030. The
present and ongoing phase of digital
transformation is more powerful and
challenging than previous technological
transformational phases.
In the past, we have leapfrogged
from mainframes to PCs and from the
informational web to e-commerce driven
Internet. At present, digital disruption
is radically changing economies, cities,
communities and the landscape of business.
The connected world has become too
big and too complex for us humans to
effectively administer by our own skills.
The networks of tomorrow, with their
dense array of devices, sensors, systems,
appliances, applications, will not be
manually administered.
They will be too complex, too
cumbersome, too complicated, and fast
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changing, that much more than manual
administration will be required. Traditional
networking models simply do not scale and
perform to meet the expectations of this
digital era.
With this spate of challenges, businesses
need a new networking framework, that
is simplified and more secure to use. IDC
indicates that businesses that have invested
in modern networks, have improved
their rate of growth in revenue, customer
retention and profit, by a factor of two to
three times. For digital organisations, the
network is the foundation of their business
and success.
In the connected world of today, every
company is becoming a technology company.
While connected devices present useful
business opportunities, the complexity
of managing the devices and the network
itself, in an efficient and secure manner, is a
challenge for present day technologies.
This means every company needs to have
security, on the top of its boardroom agenda.
Organisations that make cybersecurity a
critical foundation for their digital growth
strategies will accelerate their
innovation and reduce their time to
market. Security is the most sensitive
and critical component of digital
transformation.
Increasingly industry analysts
now agree that the way forward to
tackle security challenges in digital
organisations is through the network.
It is within the network that people,
processes and data collide, and
technology itself presents solutions to
move forward.
From the field of analytics, machine
learning can be used to build complex
models and algorithms within networks
that are capable of generating forward
looking trends. Analytical models
inbuilt inside networks can produce
reliable and repeatable decisions and
can uncover hidden insights through
learning from historical relationships
embedded in data.
Machine learning can give networks
the ability to learn without being
programmed. This approach has
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INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS