How Infrastructure Decisions Directly Affect Business Outcomes

Modern business moves at the speed of IT, and the pervasiveness of the cloud over the past decade has both introduced efficiencies and thrust a spotlight on the importance of robust infrastructure management to ensure the lights stay on. If access to email services, collaborative workspaces, or other cloud-based applications like CRM are interrupted, downtime can be measured not just in minutes, but in dollars.

While most businesses once ran via a traditional client/server model, the ever-growing shift towards cloud-based services has placed a significant load on the infrastructure manager to ensure mission-critical applications are available 24/7. According to research conducted last year by New York-based analysts 451 Research, enterprise IT executives predict that as many as 60 percent of workloads will run in the cloud by 2018. Similarly, Gartner has reported that cloud computing will drive more than $1 trillion USD in IT spending by 2020.

It’s no secret that connectivity underpins modern business operations and has a direct impact on productivity. 

From jittery video calls that essentially render calls unusable, to a lack of access to mission critical applications – including backup and recovery – seamless connectivity matched to workload requirements has an impact on a knowledge worker’s capacity to be productive; both in or out of the office.

Different workloads have different requirements and place different loads on the network. As more businesses begin to work with managed cloud services providers to help integrate cloud-based services ranging from Sharepoint to DropBox to Microsoft Office 365, there is a massive load placed on infrastructure architecture to ensure it delivers against business objectives.

Microsoft's ExpressRoute is designed to create a private connection between businesses and Azure data centres without the need to send packets over the public internet. This offers faster speeds, increased reliability, and lower latency than typical internet connections and is ideal for demanding, latecy-intolerant workloads like video. Fastrack Technology offers CloudConnect, which is optimised to deliver high-performance connections and is the ideal solution for businesses migrating to the cloud – especially those looking to shift to Microsoft Office 365.