No Network, no nothing. The best way to understand the meaning of something, is to picture a life without it. Would our world be the same without the network? Would business?

While turning off the network isn’t something we would do, network outages do happen, having a massive impact on business and our lives as consumers, even if we don’t realize it. Gartner estimates that, on average, every minute of downtime will cost a business $5,600, which adds up to over $300k per hour and over 7 million a day!

An even more common problem is slow networks. As the number of users and devices coming online increases by the second (more in Asia than in any other part of the world!), more companies will continue to experience irresponsive networks, which is a barrier to the speed at which they need to deliver new innovation to stay competitive in this digital world.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like this and companies can address these and other challenges by shifting to digital networks. At a minimum, these allow for automated and simpler IT operations. But at its full potential, digital networks help companies change business models, innovate more and be more profitable.

Want to know more? Listen to this #CiscoChat Podcast with Brink Sanders, MD of Software and Network Transformation for Cisco in APJ, where he talks about the power of networking, explores the reasons and consequences of slow or broken networks and what's the way forward for businesses to thrive in 2018 and beyond.

This is the first podcast in the series "2018 Predictions: Data, Disruption & Downtime". Stay tuned for the next one on the future of work with Annella Heytens, VP of Human Resources at Cisco APJ.