Stefan Mileschin

There needs to be a better plan

NTT's ‘2020 Global Network Insights Report’ has found that as businesses move applications to multi-cloud environments, investment in the cloud is outpacing organisations’ on-premises infrastructure spend.

The report said that this has caused refresh and upgrade patterns to slow down, with many businesses choosing to continue to sweat network assets and to slow investment in re-architecting their on-premises network and security infrastructure. As a result, there has been an increase in obsolete and unpatched network devices containing software vulnerabilities, introducing risk, and exposing the organisation to information security threats.

The report, which is based on data from technology assessments conducted on more than 1,000 clients covering over 800,000 network devices, found 45.6 percent of organisations’ network assets in Europe were ageing or obsolete, as a weighted average, representing a huge surge on 2017, when this figure was just 12 percent.

The COVID-19 outbreak and consequent surge in bandwidth consumption is putting strain on the network, compounding existing challenges, and, ultimately, creating a perfect storm. With an increase in remote working, remote access and consumption of voice and video services, organisations’ network and security infrastructure are under incredible pressure.

Rob Lopez, Executive Vice President, Intelligent Infrastructure, NTT said: “In this ‘new normal’ many businesses will need, if not be forced, to review their network and security architecture strategies, operating and support models to better manage operational risk. 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.”

https://fudzilla.com/news/memory-and...tructure-spend