The Bandwidth Bottleneck

By Greg Griffiths, VP of Retail Solutions, EarthLink

For the past few months, my colleagues and I have been traveling the country, hosting CIO dinners. We do so to learn about key issues and trends and to provide a venue for CIOs to share experiences with their peers. Lots of good food but even better conversations. Not surprisingly, those conversations often started with all the projects under way to address PCI 3.0, including EMV, tokenization, and encryption.  What I learned is that although approaches may vary, everyone is spending a lot of time and resources to protect cardholder data. Many are making headway in this area and are now turning their attention back to their application roadmap.

When they do, it seems that one roadblock exists for all: “How do I optimize my store and cloud network to assure the performance of the applications I want to roll out?” A common phrase I heard was: “A skinny T-1 just won’t cut it anymore.” And most agreed that innovation is being throttled back because the cost of upgrading network bandwidth makes it difficult to create an ROI on any given project.

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