Do you still need to optimise?

Despite the political controversy over its value to the Australian public, the NBN is going to be a hugely beneficial piece of national infrastructure. Faster and more reliable speeds will mean new applications can be developed to the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.

Cloud computing is another hot topic set to benefit from the NBN. One of the challenges to cloud computing has been the performance of wide area networks, and in order to have a reasonably-performing wide-area network, clients will need to pay for expensive broadband speeds to get access to the cloud.

Position that Citrix director of product sales

It's a position that Citrix director of product sales, Australia and New Zealand, Bede Hackney, agrees with, nevertheless warns that the increased capacity for remote working will as well bring with it additional concerns over security that will as well need to be addressed at the network level.

The percentage of workers with the capability to work remotely has grown dramatically in the past five years - at that time, a common percentage of remote workers would be around 20-30 per cent. Now and hereafter with the NBN, networks are going to need to be able to handle near the entire workforce with smart phones, tablet devices and notebooks, all looking to access the corporate infrastructure from two or three devices simultaneously.

Reasonable cost universally available

"Some have said 'if I have this bandwidth at a reasonable cost universally available, I don't need to optimise the network any more, the NBN will take care of the problem'," Raper said.

"When people start to perceive the network bottleneck is gone, at that time the responsibility for performance and improvement will go back to the IT group - when clients start to enable these optimised networks on the NBN, the others that don't have them will see obviously they're at a disadvantage."

This is in line with Gartner innovation vice-president, Geoff Johnson, who claims that the NBN will change the "sensation of storage". The need for optimised networks will continue. Latency will continue to be an issue the NBN cannot in itself resolve, so in spite of the faster speeds, network bottlenecks and WAN optimisation solutions will need to be considered and resolved.

The NBN is a big partner

Getting ready for the NBN is a big partner and consultancy possibility, too. In spite of the knowledge that it is coming is widespread, information on how to ready the network for the NBN is less easy to come by.

Not that it's necessarily complex. From a routing perspective, businesses aren't going to need to do much differently to what they've already got. NBN Co has been established with the industry standards bodies of Australia, and most people will buy into it as Ethernet.

The NBN will prevent Australia from belonging to a 'third world' of Internet infrastructure once it's rolled out, and will provide opportunities across education, healthcare, and boost the adoption of cloud computing.

But together the NBN will not magically solve some of the problems of the Internet on the enterprise network. Really, with the push to remote working and the proliferation of devices that fast broadband will enable, IT departments will need to be have even better optimisation policies, and may so then need guidance as the NBN is still as late as this a concept without a great deal of customer readiness.