white paper

Placing Value on
adaptive Networks

UThe value of an organization’s network infrastructure is no longer measured solely by its uptime. Its greater value is in its ability to adapt to changing business goals, defend against security threats, and operate across divisions and over external links with partners and customers.

The most successful network works effortlessly—no matter where its users connect, which devices they use, or what changes are impacting the organization. And it must do so while meeting enterprise expectations for flexibility, security and cost effectiveness.

Network decision makers are being pulled in multiple directions to meet myriad organizational demands. A survey of IT and network decision makers conducted for HP ProCurve Networking by IDG Research Services ranked their top three priorities—essentially equal—as improved service levels to end users, enhanced network security and reduced risk of operational failure. Other top priorities include improved network performance, cost control, the ability to scale/adapt to a changing application environment, and simplified network management.

Universal adaptivity Network users today expect an adaptive network that is personalized and flexible. An adaptive network optimizes the user’s application experience and greatly simplifies the IT manager’s application management challenges. It does this through personalization, which is the ability to automatically understand the identity of each user and device that accesses the network and the resource needs of the applications being used.

In the IDG Research survey, 76 percent of those polled say it is important to their organization to create an adaptive network, but just 23 percent think the term describes their own network infrastructure.

At the application level, the adaptive network recognizes applications moving through it and optimizes each application. For instance, for voice applications the adaptive network can assign the appropriate quality of service (QoS) to maintain voice quality, while providing the right level of security to both protect the conversation and make it optimally available to users.

Open and flexible, adaptive networks enable the entire organization to move quickly in the right direction— responding swiftly to change and competitive pressures from both a business and an operational standpoint.

Mobile and secUre

Enhanced network security is, understandably, a top priority of more than 80 percent of both large and midsize company managers participating in the IDG Research survey. With an adaptive network, distributed intelligence is pushed out to the edge of the network so that authorized users can move freely around the organization and securely reconnect at any appropriate location.

Users need access from both fixed and mobile locations and a variety of connectivity options. The enterprise network must be able to adapt to new geographic domains such as metropolitan area networks, mobile wireless connectivity and converged applications, including Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).