Nearly everyone uses applications, data and networks, and we do this everywhere, at headquarters and in branches, home offices, remote offices, on planes and on our phones. Yet long distances and multiplying locations in the physical worldcause latency (which slows down applications) and bandwidth limitation issues (which increase costs) in the digital worldthat affect application performance and impact collaboration and productivity.

Modern technology creates a paradox with distance: with the popularity of mega data center, virtualization, SaaS and cloud computing, etc., packets are traveling farther and application-tiers more complex. This increasing complexity in network computing and application architectures can lead to costly bandwidth upgrades, latency, and a poor end-user experience, all of which hurt business.

The sensitivity to location has always existed for computing, but various trends and change events have gradually increased the need for location-independent computing. These include:

Cloud computing: The cloud holds great promise for scalability and cost savings, but location still remains an important factor.
Mobility: Users expect to be able to compute from anywhere. Without the ability to serve an application from anywhere, and still make it useable — or even delightful — you need to overcome distance challenges on a couple levels.
Application complexity: Applications themselves are no longer in a single location. With service-oriented architectures and an explosion in API-based data services, parts of applications may not even be under the control of IT.
Software-defined data centers: Software-defined application infrastructure is all about improving IT agility and time-to-market for new services. Forward-thinking IT leaders will use software-defined data center technologies to locate IT resources in the most optimal locations.

Location-Independent Computing gives IT the flexibility to host applications and data in the most optimal locations while ensuring flawless delivery and best user experiences.

Organizations that embrace Location-Independent Computing achieve higher people productivity, better leverage of global skills/resources and radically reduce TCO. The concept is founded on three ideas

• IT should be liberated from the limitations of distance and location.
• IT should be able to place apps and data in the most business-optimal locations.
• IT should be completely free of performance and visibility limitations