Networking and complexity go hand in hand, like chocolate and peanut butter. Though this has been the norm, it’s playing havoc with business operations. A recent ZK Research/Cube Research study found that 93% of organizations state the network is more critical to business operations than two years ago. In the same period, 80% said the network was more complex. Increasing complexity leads to blind spots, unplanned downtime, security breaches and other issues that affect businesses.
The network continues to grow in importance as a strategic business asset. A recent joint study between ZK Research and The Cube Research found that 93% of organizations felt the network was more critical to business operations than two years ago. At the same time, 80% of respondents believe the network has grown in complexity in that same time frame. The continuation of these two trends will lead to an untenable situation.
Extreme Networks Inc. recently held its annual user conference, Connect, in Fort Worth, Texas, where everything is big. In keeping with that tradition, Extreme had its own big news from the show. Day 1 news involved Extreme being approved for standard power for the 6-gigahertz spectrum for Wi-Fi. This new band was added to Wi-Fi 6E and 7, providing clean spectrum and speeds north of 1 gigabits per second.
The networking industry has been going through a major shift – the transition to the cloud. The term “cloud” was once foreign to network managers, but an increasingly dynamic and distributed workforce accelerated by the pandemic has forced network engineers to do things differently. The cloud removes the burden of managing the network box-by-box by decoupling control from the hardware and centralizing it.
In the dynamic world of retail, Wi-Fi has become critical in physical stories despite the rise of online shopping. That’s according to a recent report by Retail Systems Research and Extreme Networks Inc. titled The World is Connected: The Store Must Be Too. The report surveyed 114 executives from global retail companies with annual revenues ranging from $100 million to more than $5 billion.