Engineering simplicity
Today’ s back end networks need to seamless ly cater to consumer demand across devices
In today’s digital era, customers are more demanding, knowledgeable and empowered than ever. They want applications that are personalised to their highly specific needs, anywhere and anytime. Their expectations from enterprise products and services are compelling network operators and engineers to devise solutions that are similar in nature to consumer apps and can function on-demand while delivering the highest quality.
Due to these developments, backend networks have become more complex than ever whilst operating under unique operating conditions. They must seamlessly cater to a multitude of consumer demands across multi cloud and multi-device environments. While the cloud is powered at its heart by the data center, it also places immense pressure on this data centre to function smoothly and profitably.
Network operators are thus investing significant resources towards scaling their infrastructure in a costeffective manner to meet these enterprise and consumer demands. This is leading to the usage of complex programming languages and highly skilled developers. Additionally, human-machine interactions have also now come into the mix to further complicate matters. While the future appears promising due to the emergence of self-driving networks, the reality is that we have a long and winding way to go in order to achieve such a future.
The undervalued importance of engineered simplicity As organisations and network operators strive towards building such an infrastructure, engineering complexity often impedes their ability to respond. This forces them to relook at their network infrastructure and operations, and work towards making them as simple as possible. As we move to a more complex world, rising degrees of complexity can hinder innovation and negatively impact its rate of adoption and the trust that users ultimately have on the digital economy of the 21st century. This is why engineering simplicity is of utmost importance.
While good engineering is primarily about finding the most costefficient solution to a problem, measuring this cost is where most enterprise organizations begin to falter. This cost can be measured in terms of money, time, morale or even lost opportunities. While some of these costs can be repaid immediately, some accrue over time and become debts.
Time and money are easy to account for, but the most dangerously overlooked cost is — complexity cost, and this compounds heavily over time. This is the debt that is accrued by building complicated features or technology in order to solve problems.To resolve this, simplified engineering is the answer, but that is easier said than done.
Why network operators need engineered simplicity
For any enterprise, dealing with the emergence of 5G, IoT, edge computing and more, is leading to a situation of increased complexity that requires a relook at how network operators design and deploy their IT infrastructure. Advanced networks are some of the most resource-intensive IT operations, and for IT operators the challenge posed by increased complexity is often difficult to work with. Whether they must perform maintenance work or move new services to the cloud, they are required to divert hours and money towards operations — the simpler the better.
Engineered simplicity can greatly lower operational complexities, make network infrastructure more secure.