Optimize Performance with Shared Services
The business role of the network is to support application operations, information flow, and business processes. Yet the network has traditionally been treated as an entirely separate organization. This separation can cause problems when resolving application issues and can even lead to an ineffective solution being proposed because the network and applications were not considered as a whole.
Business and collaboration applications are more valuable and critical to organizations than ever. Yet these applications are increasingly distributed, networked, and difficult to secure, integrate, and manage.
If you can align your IT systems more closely to your business needs you can deliver, secure, and optimize applications running across networks and integrate applications and networking systems that were not designed to work together. Doing so requires a range of solutions that provide application-to-application integration and application-to-client delivery and optimization.
A systems approach that uses the network to provide shared services that work together smoothly helps you gain additional value from existing applications and extract new value from an existing standards-based IP network infrastructure. Shared services hosted in the existing network improve the operation of all applications and simplify the infrastructure required for sophisticated deployments.
With a new generation of application infrastructure designed to help you move to shared services and service-oriented architectures, your IT organization can:
- Make applications more scalable and available
- Improve access for end users
- Use far fewer server and network resources
This new generation of application infrastructure changes how applications are deployed, integrated, and managed by delivering common application functions as network-based services. Because intelligence is embedded in the network, it can understand application messages (such as purchase orders, delivery notices, or stock trades) and apply policies for routing, transformation, and security. These solutions:
- Improve application throughput and availability
- Lower operation costs
- Enhance IT flexibility
The conventional wisdom of the network as a "dumb pipe" connecting intelligent endpoints is rapidly becoming outdated as more functions are absorbed into the network, from voice services to security, data storage, and server provisioning. By extending this idea to the needs of business applications, the network emerges as a provider of application services with shared infrastructure services that improve the delivery of content to users and other applications or take on infrastructure functions that now burden development and operations teams.