CAIRO: 2012 is the year of Campus Network. The Campus Network will be the next area of investment over the next five to ten years globally and in the Middle East, and CIOs and IT managers in Egypt should pay serious attention to this key area of the organization's IT infrastructure. Trends such as Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD), mobility, virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) and unified communications are now being realized across many organizations. However, years of adding layers of complexity with every new feature, combined with the rising demand for more virtualized environments that enable cloud and support increasing mobility, has impacted the financial and technical performance of the Campus LAN. Mohamed El-Meligy, Country Manager, Egypt at networking solutions company Brocade says that to date customers looking to invest in their campus networks have had to compromise between cost and complexity: cheap but basic campus technology, or expensive but highly ‘complex to manage' solutions. Organizations under pressure to get the maximum value and optimal performance from their networks today and in the future need round-the-clock reliability and performance, with minimal manual intervention and maintenance. This year is shaping up to be the year of that most challenging client of all: the end-user. With increased use of mobile platforms, cloud services that provide access to a whole world of applications, data storage solutions that sit well outside the corporate firewall and demand for new applications at speeds the IT department just can't deliver, users have much more power than before to determine how, when and what IT services and solutions they use. And that's just the ones they use for company business! IT networking vendors are increasingly being asked to help resolves the challenges this can create, and the focus has been on making the data center more flexible, scalable and resilient so that deployment of services and applications can be facilitated quickly and smoothly. Ensuring that IT staff in end-user organizations can deploy business driven changes, while guaranteeing uptime, access, and resilience in the network to cope with increased data and greater fluctuations in demand at shorter notice, has been key. And this will continue, with ongoing adoption of virtualization and Ethernet fabrics. The problem is that much of the technology currently in vogue – cloud, unified communication and collaboration tools, video conferencing, mobile platforms/access and so on – are all about the user experience. And the user rarely, if ever sits in the data center. So if the Campus network isn't ‘up to spec', the user is likely to find the same kind of problems that the IT department has spent time and money on fixing at the data center end. Loss of connection or inability to connect, poor quality of audio or visual media, lost data, updates not updated – all those things guaranteed to drive both users and IT helpdesk up against the wall. C-level management gets increasingly frustrated at investing in things that ‘don't work'. IT staff gets frustrated that ‘it does work' but the network outside the data center can't cope and doesn't have the same built-in intelligence, so it is a nightmare to try and manage. And this issue will reach crunch point during this year. It's time to redefine the economics of the Campus LAN and recognize its importance in delivering cloud, VoIP, video, applications and the use of more mobile platforms. CIOs and IT managers in Egypt who are looking to make wise investments and right deployments need to look no further than their organization's campus network.
