Cloud has obviously become one of the biggest, if not the biggest, topics of conversation in the tech industry today. I’ve done a number of presentations, panels and roundtables on the subject and the big topic of conversation is always security and deployment strategy, which makes sense based on where we are in the evolution of cloud. However, I do think one of the often overlooked topics of investigation is the impact on the network and how to optimize user experience.

Legacy networks are built with a “hub and spoke” design. That is, all branches connect to a single “hub” location from which they receive network-enabled services, including Internet access. So, with the hub and spoke design, all traffic, in effect, “trombones” where it comes into the central location and then back up one of the spokes to a branch office.

March Madness wrapped up this week with Kentucky winning the NCAA tournament and coach John Calipari finally getting to cut down the net and get his ring. Of late, the term “One and Done” has become synonymous with Coach Calipari since so many of his players come to play for a single year and then make the jump to the NBA.

Well, this week another organization is trying to become synonymous with the term “one and done,” and that’s IT control vendor Infoblox. On Tuesday, Infoblox announced the release of its “Automation Task Board” which is designed to enable cross-function, multi-step, time-consuming tasks with a single mouse click. One and done. Additionally, since the solution simplifies complex tasks through its automation engine, the tasks can be pushed down to lower-level IT professionals, including help desk personnel, instead of always having to call that highly compensated CCIE who’s always too busy to attend to things right away.

Having the right management tools in place before supporting BYOD can significantly raise the chances of having a successful deployment.

The phrase “resistance is futile” became most popular from the “Star Trek: Next Generation” series when the Borg would attack an enemy ship and take it over. They would warn that “resistance is futile” and then take the ship and all its people over. In fact, even the mighty Jean Luc Picard found that resistance was indeed futile and wound up becoming “Locutus of Borg” for a bit of time.

I see a similar trend here when it comes to consumer devices in the enterprise. The user panel at Enterprise Connect was quite eye opening. Here we have some high-level IT executives, historically the final decision makers on all things technology in a company, and three of the five seemed to be cool on the concept of bring-your-own-device.