From the multi-tiered skyline of Hong Kong punctuated by green parks and hills and awash with water, to the hazy tropical sprawling metropolis of Manilla – Asia is unique. A waterway cuts directly through the Bund area of Shanghai, ringed by unique buildings shaped like strings of pearls, castles and needles. Indonesia’s glass and steel give way to lush expanses of trees with white or black sand beaches, while Singapore’s unique architecture blends with greenery and the art of the world’s only city-island-nation. Asia is diverse.
SEA an “underappreciated global construction market – a quiet giant” accounting for the largest share of the global construction industry, keeping pace with the growth and expansion of businesses. The construction of an enterprise is akin to the proper construction of a safe and solid building. Built upon a solid technology infrastructure, come the applied systems, information and finally the business. And this solid technology infrastructure must be built to align with your future business objectives.
In modern portfolio theory, it is well known that a diversified portfolio can be very effective to reduce non‐systematic risks. In a vast over-simplification, the IT infrastructure of your business encompasses diverse interconnected elements of hardware, software and networking. To break it down into byte-sized pieces, successful deployment of these three primary components and simultaneous construction for the business you want, and not the business you have, requires you to take many elements into consideration:
Virtualization – is not a new concept. It saves on energy costs, enables faster deployment, reduces downtime, improves disaster recovery options and enables quick and easy cloud computing. Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) consolidates traditional hardware-appliance based security, IP network, storage and server into one tier of commodity hardware (x86 server), which forms a standardized HCI unit. By building IT infrastructure with a standardized HCI vendor like Sangfor, your network will be highly visible with centralized operation and management via a unified Web platform, allowing you to enjoy a ultra-simplified, on-demand IT framework that is evolvable as your business grows.
Latency & Downtime – an unacceptable element for any business. Gartner says that the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute and could be as high as $540,000 per hour. Virtualization has seen many applications move to data centres and farther from end-users, creating latency issues (especially for branch users), and at its worst, creating IT downtime. You can’t afford downtime, but consider how much latency you can afford, based on the number of transactions you expect, the amount of inter-office communication you plan to do or the distance between the HQ and any existing or potential branches.
Design and build to avoid potential bottlenecking, and with the scalability required for future growth. The implementation of a WAN solution like SD-WAN provides your company with a competitive edge, by expanding your business potential through seamless connectivity among offi¬ces, campuses, research facilities or manufacturing plants in different locations, locally or globally. SD-WAN simplifies the management and operation of a WAN by decoupling the networking hardware from its control mechanism, an invaluable tool for multi-branch enterprises and multi-level organizations.
Storage – while new businesses might not have acquired a significant amount of data, data has become the life-blood of enterprise. Consider the future cost of expansion capacity and the amount of downtime it will cause, should you find (and you will) that you need additional storage. For example, academic and financial environments compile data at an alarming rate if your infrastructure is unprepared to handle it – and the loss of records and data is simply not an option for a well-organized business.
Security – is a critical aspect of any infrastructure then, now, and in the future. The movement of money and information is irresistible to the criminal element, and inability to comply with compliance standards in your region and internationally will limit your growth potential from day 1. The statistics on loss due to cyber-crime are well known, and SMB’s are at more risk than well-established multi-national organizations with dedicated security personnel and all the money in the world to pay fines, hire lawyers and security professionals and make up any loss for their consumers. Traditional internet security solutions are becoming obsolete in the face of rapidly evolving malicious software. Implementation of a Next Generation Firewall like NGAF is imperative in the face of the dangerous cyber-threat landscape today, tomorrow and every day in the future.
The options for robust and scalable infrastructure are as diverse as the APAC landscape. In the next series instalment (3 of 5), we will discuss how to gain a full understanding of IT capabilities and how to fill the knowledge gaps.
Why Sangfor?
Founded in 2000 and a publicly traded company as of 2018 (SANGFOR STOCK CODE: 300454 (CH)), Sangfor Technologies is an APAC-based, global leading vendor of IT infrastructure solutions specializing in Network Security and Cloud Computing. Visit us at www.sangfor.com to learn more on how make your IT simpler, more secure and more valuable.
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Sangfor Technologies is a leading vendor of Cyber Security and Cloud Computing solutions. The majority of the blogs that you are seeing here are written by professionals working at Sangfor. We have a team of content writers, product managers and marketing experts who are taking care of writing articles on various topics that are relevant to our audience. Our team ensures that the articles published are factually correct and helpful to our customers and partners to know more about the recent trends on Cyber Security and Cloud, and how it can help their organizations.
