If the UK goes into recession it could provide IT
managers with reasons to offshore network services and re-think
applications and connectivity management, delegates at the
Communications Management Association's 2008 conference will hear
next week.
Camille Mendler, VP at technology consulting firm Yankee Group,
will describe recession as the right time for IT managers to push
offshoring, to
locations such as India and China, as a strong argument to
reduce costs.
"One of the key areas managers could be looking to offshore is
in remote infrastructure management. That's all aspects of the Lan
and aspects of the Wan environment, routers, switches and servers,"
said Mendler.
The decision to offshore would require businesses to install
good telecommunications links to manage that infrastructure from
abroad, as well as building in redundancy in the event of outages,
she said.
In a separate presentation, Chris Lewis, senior VP telecomms
research at Ovum, will say that even though network capacity will
rise,
managing the quality of connections will be the main challenge
for IT managers especially as hosted applications such as
Salesforce.com become more widespread in the enterprise.
"Just because you have a multi-megabit, or even in the future, a
gigabit connection into your data centre or office doesn't mean
you're going to get a quality connection end to end."
Lewis said that IT managers may need to work closer with telecos
to guarantee network capacity, but to ensure that they don't
overspend, they should draft employee profiles based on the
applications they need access to, the degree of mobility required
and then the device they use over the network.
On the issue of rolling out fast broadband, David Harrington,
CMA regulatory affairs forum leader, will argue that the UK
government should follow the lead of
countries like Japan by setting target dates to achieve
nationwide coverage. He said, "In the UK you have ministers saying
we need to ensure that, or we must work with other to ensure that.
It's woolly, it's indeterminate, there are no targets and this
needs to change."