Why Today’s IT Infrastructures Aren’t Suited for the Modern Digital Workplace

The digital economy is reshaping how private and public enterprises create and deliver value. This transformation creates significant challenges for many of today’s IT infrastructures. A primary reason is many were deployed as an extension of a classic centralized security stack. That centralized infrastructure wasn’t designed to possess the flexibility needed for the digital workplace:

• They’re not optimized for latency-sensitive workflows
• They’re not optimized for data-intensive workflows
• They don’t effectively solve for ubiquitous “work from anywhere”
• They don’t solve for zero trust security
• They don’t provide a high-quality experience

Let’s take a deeper dive into the typical IT infrastructure and what’s necessary for a digital workplace:

A TYPICAL IT INFRASTRUCTURE IS:

1. Designed for temporary use – Increased usage results in compute-bound performance bottlenecks
2. Designed as an extension of office work – Backhauls the user to centralized systems resulting in network-bound performance bottlenecks
3. Characterized by inadequate quality of experience – Users unpredictability routed across internet, impacting the customer/employee experience
4. Developed with an implementation of a centralized security model – Centralized security enforcement via backhaul doesn’t address vulnerability points or improve security posture.

A DIGITAL WORKPLACE INFRASTRUCTURE IS:

1. Designed to be always-on – Capacity is hosted at points of presence and interconnected to clouds to create elasticity
2. Designed for ubiquitous work – Traffic is consolidated at points of presence and interconnected to local services that are optimized for latency, throughput and ubiquity
3. Characterized by a performant quality of experience – Users, things, networks, and capacity are integrated within proximity of centers of data exchange to optimize workflow and experience
4. Developed with a zero trust security model – Security controls are hosted and interconnected at points of presence to enable policy enforcement at ingress/egress points

Evolving to an IT infrastructure that adapts to the trends and challenges of today’s digital economy requires a decentralized infrastructure. That modernized infrastructure removes data gravity barriers, accommodates distributed workflows, solves global coverage, integrates physical/virtual worlds and interconnects to digital ecosystems.

Our Digital Workplace Blueprint provides you with a layout for a purpose built architecture for the digital workplace. It’s designed for the ubiquitous, performant, always-on, and secure access to data and applications. Think of it as resolving four C’s:

1. Coverage
2. Connectivity
3. Capacity
4. Control

Access our Digital Workplace Blueprint, and take the next step towards optimizing your IT infrastructure for the modern digital workplace.