How CIOs can lead the way in accelerating network evolution

In a time of economic uncertainty, Alan Stewart-Brown at Opengear describes how CIOs can plot a path though the rapidly changing corporate IT network landscape

OPEX spend is under strain as persistent inflation rises in the Eurozone and UK leads to rate hikes and an increasing cost of capital. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are anxiously checking the company balance sheets and working within stretched budgets as financial situations change. However, network evolution waits for no business.

Even as the economy stalls, organisations need to increase efficiency and reduce costs while continuing to uphold cast-iron security and resilience. As the custodians of strategic direction of digital transformation in businesses today, it’s up to CIOs to ensure that the same level of evolution continues to roll along in times of both prosperity and difficulty.

However, to make this happen, CIOs must help network professionals overcome the main barriers to progress. Staff are being hindered from providing improved services due to outages and performance issues.

In fact, research shows that 45% of professionals find responding to disruptions a top network challenge. Almost a third (31%) say that the biggest issue is identifying the root causes and quickly remediating security or performance problems.

Bringing engineers into the conversation

Collaboration between CIOs and wider staff including network engineers has sometimes been lacking, with only 12% stating that they have a significant amount of involvement in influencing the strategic focus of their organisation’s digital transformation.

However, these teams oversee the entire network and have the clearest visibility of where innovative initiatives can be implemented. With CIOs and wider staff singing from a different hymn sheet, frustrated engineers will be rushing to implement quick-fix solutions to performance or security issues with one hand tied behind their back.

Engineers are best placed to suggest the right technologies, and it’s up to the CIOs to listen and provide them with what they need.

Evolution will be almost impossible to an engineer that is unable to remediate an issue remotely at 3am, or is lacking connectivity from Day 1 when trying to send equipment to an unmanned location. The consequences of extended downtime can range from stunted productivity, risks to data security or loss of money for a business. Uptime’s 2022 Data Centre Resiliency Survey reveals that 60% of network failures result in at least $100,000 in total losses, an increase of 39% since 2019.

In times of economic difficulty, it’s a risk that businesses can’t afford to take. CIOs must look towards purpose-built future-focused solutions to meet the evolving needs of their staff and protect the organisation moving forward.

Delivering the right tools

CIOs must deliver a network solution to engineers that provides separate access to the production network, giving them the ability to remotely monitor and manage all devices so that any outage can’t affect primary operations. Out of Band (OOB) management is the way to achieve this, with the most critical functions locked down and the secure OOB network available to configure and manage devices as needed.

To add even greater resilience, organisations can make use of Smart OOB solutions paired with cellular failover capabilities to provide sufficient bandwidth for critical processes to continue to operate during an outage.

Implementing NetOps processes are then the next step for engineers to enable network innovation and evolution. A Smart OOB management network already provides presence and proximity to local devices, so is ideally suited to facilitate automated deployments that prioritise agility and scalability. Smart OOB Console servers can support automation, such as standard Docker containers and a Python runtime environment, enabling engineers to perform a number of tasks simultaneously and extend OOB functionality to network management systems in place.

To gain full visibility of all the active automated processes, intuitive software provides an overview to engineers of console servers with automation capabilities and provides seamless access to console ports via connected applications.

With API-driven capabilities, engineers can access remote networks securely, regardless of the method in which the network has been connected or the type of interaction from the user. To drive additional automation capabilities, Docker containers can be pushed to remote locations as needed.

CIOs taking the lead

Economic conditions threaten progress at a time where network evolution is a necessity, leaving organisations at risk of falling behind. While CIOs must stick to the financial limitations set by the business when undertaking digital transformation projects, this shouldn’t come at a detriment to the value that engineers can provide.

CIOs have a responsibility to connect more closely with their engineers and discover where their challenges lie. With a significant number finding it difficult to respond to disruptions and remediate the issue, it’s then up to the senior leaders to bring in the technologies that address their concerns.

Carefully chosen network solutions, such as Smart OOB, automation integrations and easy-to-use interfaces can enable engineers to secure their networks, increase efficiency and resiliency and reduce expenditure.

In a time of drained budgets and the need to make the most of every investment, these tools lay the foundation for digital transformation.

Alan Stewart-Brown is VP EMEA at Opengear

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com