The cost of network pressure

Enterprises in all sectors are becoming technology businesses in their own right. IT infrastructure now not only supports operations, but also increasingly drives customer interactions and overall business success.

It’s not only happening across banking and retail — sectors which are widely known as having undergone a disruptive shift from bricks-and-mortar to a digital focus — but for all companies who rely on the internet, software, computers and network systems.

And disruptive technology advancements are set to continue.

Cloud exchanges to connect public cloud services are gaining popularity with businesses as they enable organisations to significantly improve performance, bring down infrastructure overheads and ensure high availability and security. As the penetration of cloud increases, businesses need to be able to fully harness the power of the cloud provider of their choice, whether it be Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, IBM SoftLayer or Amazon Web Services.

Additionally, the need to process and store information is increasing for businesses exponentially. In many ways, data analysis is the lifeblood of the contemporary enterprise, with unified communication technologies also a key consideration for businesses as the uptake of services like instant messaging, video conferencing and mobility grows.

In fact, research firm Frost & Sullivan predicted that the Australian unified communications (UC) market will see an 8.6% growth between 2011 and 2018, and will be worth over $1 billion by the year 2016.

However, the challenge this has created for many companies is the size, scale and flexibility required of the IT department. Many organisations aren’t prepared for, or don’t recognise, the amount of digital information connected devices and big data will provide. To make matters worse, many businesses overlook the pressure these new technologies will place on their legacy IT network.

While the impact might seem minimal, this pressure can manifest itself in slow speeds and bottlenecks — problems that prevent staff and business owners from getting work done, eventually limiting a business’s ability to respond quickly to market conditions.

Further to this, poor network management results in costly downtime. Downtime is expensive due to a combination of labour and revenue cost. In addition to the damage the business can suffer with customers, there’s also the loss of faith in the infrastructure supporting a business, which can result in poor employee engagement. No one wants to be working in an organisation that can’t deliver basic IT services.

The ramifications of poor network management not only affect end users, administrators and business owners, but network engineers too. The job of an enterprise network engineer has moved from crimping cable to managing traffic, as well as solving problems ranging from backups to firewalls and viruses. Each task comes back to moving data across the network in an efficient and secure manner, so engineers have a vested interest in futureproofing the network to save headaches and inefficiencies in the long run.

As the engineer is ultimately responsible for the functioning of the network, capacity is also a key concern. As more devices become internet-enabled, business will look to network engineers to maximise performance and uptime; yet this is an impossible task if IT departments don’t have the necessary financial and structural support from the business.

If network engineers are focused on putting out fires, and the reactive day-to-day maintenance of infrastructure, they have no capacity to focus on high-level design and planning, which is business-critical in today’s competitive market.

Given the expense and opportunity costs when networks fail, it’s incredible to think that many enterprises are reliant on IT networks that have remained unchanged for years.

Even though the demands and requirements for infrastructure today are far greater than they once were, businesses are still operating with networks designed for a time before cloud and unified communications technology.

As much as technology is an opportunity for companies to drive efficiencies, innovate and grow, it also creates a need to actively manage and improve IT infrastructure. For IT departments and staff to know where to start when futureproofing their network, the first step is to define it, followed by identifying and prioritising traffic. Once this has been completed, reviewing the links in place and improving the quality of the links that are in use allow the IT operators to focus on network redundancy, making sure the network is available in case of a network device or path failure and unavailability.

Even with the best technology and IT systems, a business can only function as well as its underlying infrastructure, and businesses can fall prey to downtime when focus is taken off what is truly important to operations — the network. 

Case study

nib, one of Australia’s fastest growing health insurers, is a company that recently saw fit to upgrade its network infrastructure. The rapid growth of its business and customer base has seen nib expand across the ANZ region with hubs in Newcastle, Sydney and Auckland. While the expansion has resulted in great success for the business, the company identified an opportunity to improve intrabusiness collaboration due to the physical separation and distribution of its offices and workforce. Additionally, increasing demand from customers had resulted in larger call volumes to multiple, dispersed contact centres which was placing significant strain on the traditional network.

nib sought to solve these problems by implementing a dependable trans-Tasman solution — a network that would not only be able to improve communication channels between nib’s internal teams, but also result in greater customer service outcomes for its thriving customer base.

Brendan Mills, chief information officer for nib, said, “We needed to further enhance our internal communication touchpoints and develop the scalability of our customer contact centre so that we could better handle peak call demands.

“To do so, we implemented a new network model that provided converged contact centre SIP voice connectivity and IP WAN data network services. The voice services are predominately SIP-based, which instantly improved our ability to manage and shift calls within our contact centre delivery points. Furthermore, this enabled us to cater for peaks and troughs in call volume as we could reallocate calls, routing them wherever we wanted.

“The IP WAN network services allowed us to present rich communication to end points across our network, including improving communication channels between our internal teams by introducing collaboration tools such as video conferencing. Our old infrastructure simply did not have the bandwidth to handle video,” said Mills.

The new communications model has not only allowed nib to continue to expand its operations without any disruption, but has also opened the door to further development in terms of online customer service and communication.

“We think video will become a channel of choice for customers wanting to interact with us and we are now confident that we can offer that with the bandwidth we have in place.

“The new model is commercially sound, and it will also deliver cost savings in terms of downtime, but the greatest benefit to our business has been the overall improvement in the delivery of communications services,” said Mills.