Your company threw wads of cash at the hottest Web designer to give its e-commerce site just the right look. It poured a fortune into a state-of-the-art warehouse and customer service support to ensure on-line orders get fulfilled on time. Now it’s just a matter of sitting back and watching as the sales and dollars flood in.
Unless, of course, your company forgot to involve its networking team in planning and building a high-availability infrastructure to support its on-line operation. Network managers may not know much about showy graphics and colourful prose, but they do know how much bandwidth is required to keep up with 100,000 hits a day and what equipment’s required to keep a network humming 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The bottom line is it doesn’t matter how much glitz and glamour an e-commerce operation has if it’s not available when customers want to use it.