For growing multi-site businesses, that tipping point usually arrives faster than anyone is expecting – and the cause is mostly structural.
“You start to see it in the day to day,” says Danny Price, executive general manager of enterprise and business delivery at Optus.
“IT teams become firefighters. They become less strategic about where they’re planning their year ahead, and too tactical in the business. That’s a sure sign that customers are starting to outgrow their IT departments.”
SmartCompany spoke to experts from Optus and Cisco in our latest deep dive ebook, Growing without the growing pains: Secure, connected workplaces for modern multi-site businesses. Download the full ebook here or keep reading for a preview of what’s covered.
The pressure in growing multi-site businesses comes from sheer scale, on several fronts at once.
“There’s growth in devices: phones, laptops, cameras, printers, coffee machines, fridges, you name it,” says Davin Gibb, sales director at Cisco.
“There’s growth in locations. And application workloads have grown from a single data centre into multiple cloud environments.”
Layered on top of this is vendor sprawl. As businesses scale across sites – and as IT leadership changes hands – the number of systems and suppliers quietly creeps up.
“People come in with fresh new ideas of what they’ve done in the past, so you may see new vendors come in,” Price says. “Other customers might have committed spend or committed infrastructure with a certain vendor.”
That often results in a patchwork that’s expensive to run and even harder to manage, especially for a team of only a handful of people wearing multiple hats. And it’s this ‘patchwork’ where the real danger hides.
Managing each site and system separately opens up significant security gaps.
“When systems are run in fragmented modes, becoming almost islands of different policies and different configurations, the organisation is exposed to risk,” Gibb says. “And when there are gaps between policy enforcement, it’s those gaps that create opportunities for threats.”
In other words, a team that’s permanently firefighting is stretched thin while simultaneously operating a setup with blind spots that attackers can exploit.
This is the point at which many growing businesses realise the fix isn’t another tool bolted onto the pile.
Instead, it’s a different way of connecting sites altogether. That’s where SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking) comes in.
In decades gone by, linking multiple locations meant relying on MPLS – a private network that’s reliable but rigid, expensive and slow to change, where standing up a new site could take weeks. SD-WAN flips that model, and Gibb says the “software-defined” part is the crux.
“Instead of box-by-box communication, it’s harnessing a platform that takes away the communication for you, so you don’t have to worry about it,” he says. “That platform presents a simple way for your teams to interface, gives you the integration and high-level reporting on the health of the network, and makes running the network far easier.”
Practically speaking, that means prioritising business-critical traffic like voice and video, spinning up new sites in days rather than weeks, and managing the whole network from a single view – instead of chasing problems across a dozen disconnected consoles.
It’s the difference between reacting to fires and seeing them coming.
SD-WAN also lets networking and security stop working as separate islands. “There is security capability on every networking device, and strong networking capability on every security device,” Gibb says. “When they come together, the ability to distribute, enforce and identify security policy is of tremendous value.”
Getting there starts with architecture, according to Price: “It all starts with your IT architecture. It must be secured-by-design, and you have to look at a rolling three-year architecture.”
His advice for lean teams is to resist the temptation to over-engineer. Instead, look into proven platforms “completely out of the box” rather than customising everything to the nth degree.
For most growing businesses, a managed partner is what makes that transition realistic without having to hire an army. Modern managed models are also co-managed – the provider handles the heavy lifting while the internal team retains control of day-to-day changes. “It’s the best of both worlds,” Price says.
The payoff? A team that finally gets to stop reacting and start planning. If your IT team is stuck fighting fires, it might be less about how hard they’re working and more about the foundations they’re working on.
Want to know more? Download SmartCompany’s free ebook in partnership with Optus and Cisco, Growing without the growing pains: Secure, connected workplaces for modern multi-site businesses. Download here.
Find out more about Optus Secure Workplace Solutions here.
Simon Jones is a writer, editor and freelance content marketer working across the technology, finance, B2B and B2C sectors.
Optus and Cisco have partnered for more than 25 years, supporting over 2000 joint customers across Australia. Backed by Optus’ secure, award-winning network and deep managed services expertise, and more than 500 Cisco Black Belt certifications, customers benefit from proven capability trusted in highly regulated environments, applied at scale.
