Making the campus LAN cloud-ready

     
     The spread of mobile devices, desktop virtualisation, and the need for greater collaboration is transforming the campus LAN (local area network) requirement. Users now need to access services delivered over the cloud, business video, and front-office applications with high performance and reliability. End users are increasingly relying on delivery to devices anywhere, anytime, including from consumer devices.

     
     Every link in the enterprise network has therefore become mission-critical, and this includes the campus LAN "last mile." Traditional campus LANs were designed to link desktop workers for client/server applications access. This type of traffic wasn't bandwidth-intensive or sensitive to delays, and IT managers didn't need to closely integrate wired and wireless campus LAN infrastructures.

     
      And security was often a secondary consideration, as guest network access usually wasn't a factor. IT managers also tended to install capacity for traditional LANs, that wouldn't be needed until a later date, and LAN evolution was handled organically. This usually resulted in the deployment of a wide range of hardware and network operating systems, with devices such as switches and routers being handled device-by-device in an overly-expensive, time-consuming and error-prone way.

     

     Today, however, enterprises need their campus network design to be cloud-ready and provide fault-tolerant and high-performance networking, while offering simplified deployment, automated management and resiliency. According to IDC, there will be 1.2 billion mobile workers by next year, and this will result in many IT organisations struggling to support growth in mobile employees, complicated by the recent trend to bring your own device (BYOD) to work. Cloud computing will grow significantly in the next five years also. Public IT cloud services will reach US$72.9bil (RM218.7bil) in 2015 - a compound annual growth rate CAGR) of 27.6%, according to IDC.

      
     By 2015, US$1 in every US$7 spent on packaged software, server, and storage offerings will be through the public cloud model. Many organisations have already started datacentre consolidation to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and provide dynamic resource provisioning.