Cywest Blog

With demands on IT departments increasing, CIO’s are pressured into trying to do more with less to meet the rising demands of the organizations they work for. Therefore they are constantly searching for the ultimate levels of functionality and performance without draining the business profits. This level of pressure can push some into making quick and foolish decisions – and ultimately, believe the hype. And we all know that if it sounds too good to be true - it usually is!

For 20 years, Cywest has operated on the belief that the telecom industry can do better. We built our Intelligently Scalable Virtual Network (ISVN) because we wanted to multiply what works with a smarter network design. We’ve backed that up with next-level support and a knowledge base that is second to none. Since 1998, we’ve sought to delight our customers with what we consider the best network in the world.

These days companies are trying to be as agile as possible in order to react quickly and efficiently to what their customers need. This means they need an agile IT infrastructure – and so IT departments are constantly looking for ways to make their underlying infrastructure more agile while reducing their spend on communications.

The message out there at the moment is that SD WAN provides the answer to this. It’s being marketed as a network approach that can deliver performance and cost benefits, including end to end network visibility and feedback to improve transmission efficiencies on the 

Businesses tend to view their IT department in one of two ways: either they are a driver of value to the organization or they are a huge drain on the budget. In the latter it usually falls to the CIO to cut costs as far as possible. The truth is, cutting costs is easy – but rarely has the desired effect, especially in this new digitalized age. There needs to be an organizational mind shift so instead of being viewed as a dead weight holding you back – IT are the engine that will drive the business forward.

Choosing the right type of network for your organization is key to its success. The longer it takes your employees to carry out their work, the more it impacts your bottom line profits. Right now companies everywhere are deciding whether to upgrade their networks from traditional Wide-Area Networks (WAN), that are the digital foundation of every organization, to take the plunge into software-defined wide area networks (SD -WAN). But no one should take this jump without considering all the information available.

It seems that these days anyone can be a hacker. With access to YouTube for instructions and tools easily downloaded, almost anyone can imitate the basic skills in order to infiltrate sensitive data sitting on vulnerable networks.  What this has created is an environment where “hacking” has become mainstream.  Hacks can be done from nation states, all the way down to the 12 year old from his computer that is powerful enough to play the most intense games while running multiple displays.

Many companies collate and hold a huge amount of market sensitive data which makes their computer networks prime targets for infiltration and infection. These days, their employees are more likely to access that data from multiple devices and locations too - e.g., the office, at home, and on the move between meetings. This puts the network at an even greater amount of risk.

Last week I was at my neighbor’s house for dinner and we got onto the subject of cybersecurity. My neighbor was pretty convinced that he had good protection on his home network, but armed with nothing more than my laptop and a cold beer, I got access within 5 minutes – I could see all the machines on his network and his password too.

Linking a Great Network with a More Productive Workforce

Computers were invented to increase human efficiency and productivity in business – and as companies grow, computers are networked so that people can share data and eliminate the geography between separate business resources.  Investing in a custom designed network that is built correctly with a logical architecture that focuses on areas such as, redundancy, resiliency and performance means that it is easily flexible for company growth, rather than designing a solution that eventually results in a ramshackle collection of hardware that doesn’t live up to its potential and cause more problems as time goes on.