Collaboration

The New IT Challenge

Today, IT organizations face new challenges. The speed of change in market and business environments is making IT more strategic. Evolving business models are creating complex technology challenges that IT is being asked to address, yet in most organizations IT resources and headcount remain flat. Additionally, consumerization of IT is introducing new devices and risks that IT must manage and balance. But these new consumer devices are powerful tools that can deliver big productivity gains — if harnessed properly.The Borderless Networks Architecture is designed to help IT balance demanding business challenges and changing business models promoted by the influx of consumer devices into the business world. Borderless Network Architecture can help IT evolve its infrastructure to deliver secure, reliable, and seamless user experiences in a world with many new and shifting borders.

New Business Models

A new generation of hyper-connected employees is entering the workforce. This new generation is multimedia-savvy and socially connected. Its members are conditioned for always-on, instant, anytime, anywhere connectivity using their own devices of choice. They bring highly mobile video devices into the workplace and expect that video will be part of their interaction with employees, customers, and partners. Thus, IT must deal not only with new devices and usage models, but also with changing business practices that place huge new demands on the infrastructure.In today’s workplace, it is increasingly common that primary business resources, including data centers, applications, and endpoints as well as users, are all outside the traditional business perimeter. Extending business borders around all these resources and users taxes the IT department. IT simply cannot scale when every project is an exception to traditional IT design and management practices. IT needs a better way to scale and manage users and customers in any location, given those users may be using virtually any device to access almost any application located anywhere in the world.The Borderless Networks Architecture proposed by NextHope enables IT to architect and deploy its systems and policies efficiently to provide secure, reliable, and seamless access to resources from multiple locations, from multiple devices, and to applications that can be located anywhere.

Removing Location and Device Borders

The research firm ABI Research estimates that by 2015 more than 7 billion new wireless devices will be connected to the network. A dramatic shift toward pervasive wired and wireless access is occurring, but many organizations still treat such networks as separate entities. The Borderless Network Architecture provides the framework to unify wired and wireless access, including policy, access control, and performance management across many different device types.

Enabling Secure Access Anywhere with Any Device

The way users access information is also shifting. In the past, data and applications were housed on premises, and users were also generally on premises. Today, many organizations tap into talent pools all around the world. Workers might be full-time remote employees or contractors. Applications might be hosted off site or even in the cloud. But traditional IT still treats these crucial resources as internal entities.With the Borderless Networks Architecture, IT can unify its approach to securely delivering applications to users in a highly distributed environment. The crucial element to scaling secure access is a policy-based architecture that allows IT to implement centralized access controls with enforcement throughout the network, from server to infrastructure, to client.

Other Benefits of the Borderless Network Architecture

In addition to addressing primary business and IT challenges, the Borderless Network Architecture provides:

• A robust network platform capable of delivering real-time collaboration experiences to any device
• Transparent mobility with location services for anytime, anywhere communications
• Security for devices both on the local network and across cloud services
• Sustainability and reduced energy costs for efficient and cost-effective business operations
• Optimized application performance for rich-media applications
• Policy-based access control and identity-aware networking to enable access and collaboration while protecting business-critical applications
• Compliance with current and future government and industry regulatory requirements