Regardless of what business they are in, today’s IT leaders are under pressure to reduce costs while simultaneously improving service resilience, volume and quantity. This is not surprising given the dramatic impact of IT infrastructure spend on the corporate bottom line. Indeed, a 5% reduction in the typical infrastructure budget typically can generate up to a 1% increase in net income.

Of course, the innovative world of technology constantly invents new ways of achieving more with less. Now there are a myriad of strategies for streamlining businesses from cloud computing to consolidation and virtualization to name but three. However, what is often difficult to predict and to factor into a future-proof, profitable future, is the spiralling rise of data volumes and ever-increasing demand of customers and end users to consume data.

Today’s customer is ‘always-on’ in terms of service expectations and is rarely forgiving of interruptions, slow responses and downtime. This is particularly true where ‘live data’ or real-time information is concerned. Worse still, these types of business applications create enormous amounts of data and create a significant drain on network bandwidth and performance. So, can businesses use software solutions to not only manage that demand, but also to reduce the cost and complexity of their hardware and infrastructure? Yes.

We are currently taking a look at how organizations are revisiting their network and server architecture in a bid to address the cost/performance dilemma. We’ll review how, in today’s multi-channel and constantly connected world, they’re also redefining their approach to real-time data distribution; asking if it is possible to assure high performance data distribution while minimizing the complexity, hardware and infrastructure required to deliver scalable and resilient services.