NETWORKS
Is your network holding up your digital transformation? If you’re wondering why digital transformation still isn’t happening and you’ve interrogated all the usual suspects, maybe it’s time to ask a few searching questions about your cloud network. It may be holding up the future. BY MATT HOAG, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER WITH KOCH BUSINESS SOLUTIONS EVERY BUSINESS will have its own take on what’s holding back digital transformation - development costs, skills shortages, disappointing return on investment, legacy systems and vendor lock-in are just some of the usual suspects. That list hasn’t changed in twenty or thirty years, but we need to add a new item: cloud networking – the problem of building end-to-end network services in the cloud. From my perspective, this is the missing piece of the cloud puzzle.
First a Bit of Relevant Background Koch Industries is one of America’s biggest privately held companies, with annual revenues estimated by Forbes of $115 billion.
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ISSUE VI 2021
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The organisation has around 120,000 employees across 700 sites in 70 countries and after several major acquisitions Koch has a complex network infrastructure, including seven global networks, thousands of applications, thousands of routers and firewalls, tens of thousands of access points and hundreds of thousands of switch ports. As chief technology officer with Koch Business Solutions (KBS), our IT services arm, my job is to make sense of this global spaghetti, including the security of data and the performance of the applications on which the business and its customers depend. Ten years ago, we had a traditional network with MPLS connections between data centres, limited bandwidth to most other sites and all Internet access
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