Remember back in the '80s when computers sat on and under desks? Big, hulking CPU boxes with archaic monitors that weighed more than a typical house pet and took up about four square feet of real estate--these were the "workstations" of our workplaces. Back then, technology cost serious money: Each worker sat in front of a $6,000 workstation, connected to $50,000 worth of servers through $15,000 in software. For IT, those days were good, because serious money meant serious control. Workers couldn't be trusted to use all that expensive stuff without strict guidance from IT.
Flash forward to today. I type this column on a lightweight laptop that cost about one-fifth what those workstations cost. It's plugged into a 19-inch, $300 flat-screen LCD I bought myself, just because I wanted it and believed it would improve my work life. Did IT have any say about my setup? Yeah, right.
Dress for Success
The concept of improving one's work life through the purchase of work gear is nothing new. For years now, classy threads have supported upward mobility. More recently, smart technology has done the same. After all, the cool guys have BlackBerrys--or, as contributing editor Dave Molta calls them, Crackberrys--so if you want to be cool and your company doesn't support cool, your only option is to buy it yourself.
Herein lies the problem. Great technology is now priced so almost anyone can afford it. Gamers have much better technology at home than most of us have at work--mostly because work applications don't require it. It used to be that the spiffiest graphics cards were reserved for scientists doing visualization work, or your weather forecaster who wanted to show low-pressure areas moving in from the south. Now, it's the home gamer playing Grand Theft Auto.
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The business world is speeding up. The longer IT leaders wait to get their needs met, the more at risk their businesses and their jobs will be.
By arming SD-WAN networks with end-to-end intelligence, analytics-driven predictions, and predictive automation solutions, IT teams can simplify infrastructure management and assure higher levels of quality experiences for users.
