Adversity Drives Innovation

Economic downturns are commonly viewed as a time of retrenching and cut-backs, but they're also times of intellectual ferment and innovation. While budget cuts and scaled back programs create adversity, there remains a job to do and customers to satisfy.

The issue is how to accomplish this with fewer available resources. To do this you have to get creative, and adversity catalyzes the process. It is the gap between available resources and demand that drives innovation, creativity, and opportunity.

In the words of J.C. Maxwell, “adversity motivates.” Maxwell’s "Benefits of Adversity" identifies the positive attributes of adversity:

1. Adversity creates resilience;
2. Adversity develops maturity;
3. Adversity pushes the envelope of accepted performance;
4. Adversity provides greater opportunities;
5. Adversity prompts innovation;
6. Adversity recaps unexpected benefits;
7. Adversity motivates.

The present downturn is no exception. IT managers face budget and headcount cuts, yet the companies for which they work cannot stop running. Leveraging investments in existing infrastructure, minimizing major new capital investments, and recouping savings from company operations are the new marching orders. If satisfying existing needs was good enough then the task at hand would be straightforward – weather the adverse economic climate by cutting as much spending and headcount as possible.

But in business it isn't that simple. The end of any downturn is followed by an uptick that will require increased IT services. Cut too far today and IT won’t be able to respond tomorrow. Business will suffer - again. IT managers must therefore be cognizant of the future and look at changes and cuts with an eye towards their impact on a future recovery.

This begs the question – is it possible to batten down the hatches to survive the current economic storm while laying the foundation for a future recovery? The answer is yes...but the challenge to doing so, surprisingly, is neither technological nor monetary but conceptual.

Doing more with less requires a new way of thinking about problems. In the IT world it means reconsidering the value of overbuilding complex, expensive infrastructure. In this market, in this economy, the first priorities need to be streamlining costs, boosting productivity, and enhancing efficiency.

A simple example will drive home the point. To lower costs, most enterprises are reducing their real estate footprints. Today 88% of employees work somewhere other than the corporate headquarters - many hotel in branch offices, work from home, or work on the road. The traditional way in which these remote users would be served is with a branch router. This paradigm might be acceptable for a large office but it's outrageously expensive for a branch of just a few people.

The challenge is how to network a large and growing remote workforce in an environment focused on cost reduction. It is here that adversity catalyzes innovation. By standing the problem on its head and saying the real issue is how we enable mobility at low cost for a large number of users - not how we connect a branch office - new, non-traditional solutions emerge.

To a router vendor every problem ends with a hardware-based solution - it is the proverbial key under the streetlight. Reconstituting the problem expands the area of illumination, revealing, for instance, that cloud-computing and virtualization are new options not previously considered.

Simply reframing a question can open a completely new set of solutions. Adversity forces the process by highlighting the inadequacy of the “old school” way of thinking and opening the door to innovative new solutions. Ones that focus on today's needs instead of yesterday's answers.

VBN Killed The Branch-In-A-Box

In 1979 The Buggles released their debut single, 'Video Killed The Radio Star,' a nostalgic look at radio from the perspective of the video age that killed it.

Progress drives on, looking nostalgically in the rear view mirror from time to time, but propelled forward by the engine of our insatiable desire for something better.

Tube-based table radios are nostalgic. So are rotary phones, wooden plows, and iron clad ships. Doesn't mean we want to use them anymore. They were abandoned because something better came along. Something easier to use. Faster.Less expensive.

Technology transitions happen all the time in enterprise IT, but the branch office and fixed teleworker seem to have been neglected along the way. And what an oversight it was. Today more than 85% of employees work outside of the primary corporate campus. Yet they need - but haven't had - the same access to corporate network resources and applications as someone in the home office.

The solution cobbled together by router vendors was to remotely replicate the infrastructure that's on the corporate campus. That is, assemble a stack of appliances for security, VPN, Wi-Fi, routing - and then try to integrate them to work together.

Over time the separate appliances morphed into an integrated branch-in-a-box router. But experience showed that while you can morph a router from a hairball, but you can never take the hairball out of the router. From the user's point of view, the solution was little improved.

The fundamental problem is that the campus network and its branch offspring were designed assuming static users sitting behind protective firewalls. Mobility - mobile users specifically - breaks that model. You have to punch holes in firewalls, configure complex VLAN assignments for segmenting traffic and user types, install VPNs to protect roaming users. The list goes on and on. And grows more expensive, complex, and user unfriendly as it does.

Virtual Branch Networking (VBN) 1.0 was introduced in 2009 as a ground-up, mobility focused solution. VBN made it less expensive and simpler to securely connect remote users with the enterprise network at low cost and without changing the user experience.

VBN 2.0 goes one giant step farther by leveraging cloud services to do the job done by branch routers today - application acceleration, content security, remote access. Only it does so using a lower cost, more scalable solution that delivers a consistent user experience regardless of where you work: in the corporate HQ, in a branch office, from home, or on the road.

The cloud provides a massively scalable, economical way of delivering services and applications. It has changed the way we transfer data, download files, and use applications. When applied to branch networks, cloud services are the perfect tonic. They deliver essential business-critical services, without complexity, to widely distributed users at less than half the cost of the branch in-a-box router. This is one change you'll make and never, ever look back.

In my mind and in my branch,
We can't rewind it bought the ranch,
VBN killed the branch-in-a-box.

Read more about VBN 2.0 on-line.