IDG Contributor Network: How business growth relates to business infrastructure

With the U.S. Presidential election over, there is now talk about infrastructure investment, and by that, most people mean roads and bridges.

But not so fast. The most important infrastructure of a modern economy or a modern business is the digital infrastructure. And it’s in worse shape than our roads and bridges. Most of today’s networks were put in place 20 years ago, well before the debilitating forces of cloud, big data, social, mobile computing, and most recently the Internet of Things (IoT) eroded their effectiveness and caused data traffic congestion.

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Sure, these networks still work—they still chug along, even if they’re slower and more vulnerable than we’d like. And let’s face it; it’s human nature to take an "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" approach. But that approach didn’t work in the 1990s for the brick-and-mortar businesses as the internet era emerged, and it won’t work today for any company that needs to digitally transform and do business in the network age.

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