Whistle-stop tour of: The Enterprise Network & Data Centre.

Ever since computing resources provided a competitive advantage, organizations have been investing in their computing resources. Over time technology became not only a competitive advantage but also a necessary resource to be competitive in today’s business environment.

Since technology can bring extreme advances in productivity, sales, marketing, communication, and collaboration, organizations have invested more and more resources into technology. Organizations, therefore, built large and complex data centers and connected those data centers to an organization’s users with specialized networking, security, and computing hardware resources. Enterprise data centers became huge networks, often requiring thousands of square feet of space; incredible amounts of power; cooling; hundreds, if not thousands, of servers, switches, routers; and many other technologies. Effectively, the enterprise and especially the global enterprise environments became massive networks—just like a cloud computing environment. The net result was a powerful private cloud environment.

Global enterprise data centers and high-speed networks work well. However, these networks come with a high cost and require a high level of expertise to manage these environments. Network and data center technology is not simple, and it requires a significant staff of expensive employees to design, operate, maintain, and fix these environments. Some large enterprise technology environments take billions of dollars to create and operate.

Global enterprise networks and data centers still have merit for high security, ultrahigh- performance environments requiring millisecond-level latency, and ultrahigh network and computing performance. An example environment that benefits from this traditional model is the global financial environment, where shaving milliseconds off network, server, and application performance can equate to a significant competitive advantage. However, for many customers, the costs of procuring and operating the equipment are just too costly.

Recent advances in network, virtualization, and processing power make the transition to cloud computing feasible.