When transitioning from physical infrastructure to the cloud, it’s easy to think that your networks will instantly be faster, more reliable, and produce windfalls of cost savings overnight. Unfortunately, this wishful line of thinking fails to account for some of the complexities of cloud networking and is one of the biggest drivers of the cloud deployment mistakes we see.

The main street in my town is mostly lined with mom-and-pop shops, and I love to support these businesses. Large online retailers keep making it harder for these stores to compete, so I think it’s important to keep doing business with them when I can. Lately, it’s been interesting to see that these mom-and-pop shops increasingly have something in common with the largest online retailers: They’re reliant on the internet to deliver their goods and services to consumers.

In the evening on September 30, people across Cuba found their internet service cut. The residents of this Caribbean nation had begun protesting their government’s tepid response to Hurricane Ian which had wrought destruction a week earlier. Internet service returned to normal the following morning, but this outage wasn’t caused by storm-related damage. This blackout was a deliberate act, a fact confirmed when service dropped out for the same period of time the following day.

For organizations of all types and sizes, networks are more than just a line item on a departmental budget. Modern digital enterprises understand that long-term competitiveness depends on maximizing their IT assets to create exceptional user experiences.