Connectivity and the future of business
The future of business can mean many things, from digital transformation, growth, innovation, and everything in between. But none of these initiatives can be achieved without the right network strategy choices. And there are a lot of choices you can make about your network depending on your size, number and location of sites, topology, vendor ecosystem, and your overall strategic goals.
With 20 years of experience designing, implementing, and managing Internet networks for some of the worlds largest enterprises, we know this gets very complex very quickly. We’ve helped many multi-national enterprises solve their network complexity challenges over the years and have some tips and advice.
Business goals vs network reality
A challenge many businesses face is aligning their overall strategic business goals with their network strategy.
This can manifest itself in many ways, our top examples include:
Transformation initiatives and legacy infrastructure:
The future of business is often linked to the need for digital transformation. And the pace of digital transformation is relentless, with enterprises integrating technologies like cloud computing, AI, and IoT to drive efficiencies and deliver superior customer experiences.
However, integrating new technologies can uncover challenges with legacy infrastructure.
Legacy infrastructure challenges are a multifaceted hurdle to your transformation initiatives. If we take MPLS as an example, many businesses find it can impact cloud-first strategies. It is not as flexible or scalable enough to handle the dynamic nature of cloud applications. This can lead to:
- Higher costs.
- Difficulty managing multiple cloud access points.
The solution is to switch from MPLS to an Internet-based network, however this also has its complexities, including:
- Operational complexity: It can be challenging to find one provider who will not only manage the transition from MPLS to Internet, but who will also provide your Internet-based solution for every site and location in different geographies. This can result in managing multiple Internet providers, diverse SLAs, and dynamic traffic patterns. All adding extra layers of complexity for your IT team.
- Additional connectivity solutions: Even if you switch to an Internet-based underlay, you may need additional solutions for overlay that support your transformation initiatives. Like deploying SD-WAN to support with cloud application-aware routing, security and optimized performance.
- Global consistency: Achieving uniform performance without the right strategic approach to network management across multiple regions with varying ISPs can be difficult.
- Legacy dependencies: You may have a complex web of existing enterprise applications are designed for MPLS architectures, making migration and optimization challenging.
- Compliance risks: When you switch to Internet, you need to meet different regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.
Increasing operational efficiency:
When looking to cut unnecessary waste, save time, streamline processes and gain the competitive advantage, an overlooked area can be the network itself. Many IT leaders will find that their network is a mixture of networks and services built via mergers and acquisitions, rapid expansion, and fixes to support digital transformation initiatives.
Managing this kind of fragmented environment can be overwhelming, leading to inefficiencies, skyrocketing costs, and operational bottlenecks in the following areas:
- Managing multiple providers: If you operate across different regions, you probably work with multiple providers, each with their own SLAs, billing structures, and support frameworks.
- Network visibility: At this point it’s probably clear that vast and complicated networks are likely to have blind spots, or complicated topologies combined with multi-vendor ecosystems that make seeing the full picture difficult. You need to be able to see granular performance and service details across every site in real-time to make data-backed optimization decisions that drive efficiency.
- SLA management challenges: Variations in uptime guarantees, response times, and support levels can create service gaps, impacting business continuity.
- Complex billing structures: Fragmented networks often have complex billing structures with varying terms, currencies, and formats. All contributing to making financial management a nightmare. This often makes visibility into total connectivity spend hard, leading to inefficiencies and potential overspending.
- Customer support challenges: With multiple providers in the mix, you could be facing varying levels of support quality, language barriers, and response times. This can be exacerbated by working with multiple points of contact per provider.
International or interregional expansion:
Very closely related to the operational efficiency priority above, international and interregional expansion can often complicate the network even further, particularly in the following areas:
- Regional knowledge gaps: Understanding the nuance of Internet Service Provision across every region is a tall order and can make expanding into new markets challenging. You need to understand regulatory compliance needs, local ISP capabilities, and infrastructure limitations to make the right connectivity choices.
- Access to the right technology: Technology availability differs from region to region. For example, countries like India and Brazil benefit from existing infrastructure that supports higher fixed network speeds, but rapidly urbanizing regions like West Africa and Southeast Asia often have faster mobile networks. Understanding what is available where and which connectivity solution you need to achieve your goals at each site is critical.
- Infrastructure challenges: If you find you need to deploy a site that is in a remote location you could face issues with a lack of existing infrastructure. Then you will need to source alternative solutions. Fixed Wireless Access and Low Earth Orbit satellite connectivity are popular options, but you need to think carefully about the suitability of either option for your site.
- Local support and billing complexities: On top of the strategic connectivity decisions you need to make, managing international vendors is hard too. Language barriers, cultural differences, and varying billing practices can complicate network operations in different regions.
Supporting productivity with resilience:
When it comes to the future of business, many enterprises are focused on digital transformation to drive both innovation and efficiency as the engines of productivity, the network is also at the crux of the issue.
A network that is prone to disruption or downtime can be a huge inhibitor of productivity, lost revenue and reputational damage. But ensuring high uptime is also a complicated process:
- Network resilience: A resilient network means consistent access to applications, high-speed Internet connections in every site, keeping your teams online and productive. All enabled by technology diversity and failover measures that kick in automatically if anything impacts your primary connections. However, choosing which services would best suit your resilience needs can be complex.
- Individual site needs: You need to consider your network resilience strategy on a site-by-site basis, and tailor to the needs of that site. This is also an opportunity and practice where you can find efficiencies and know that you are not over or underserving a location.
- Monitoring and performance optimization: Proactive monitoring is essential to detect issues before they impact business operations and productivity. Enterprises need real-time insights into network performance, latency, and bandwidth usage to optimize resource allocation and prevent bottlenecks.
- Bandwidth allocation and optimization: With an increasingly distributed workforce and cloud-heavy applications, bandwidth demands fluctuate significantly. You need a dynamic way to allocate bandwidth to critical applications to ensure seamless performance without unnecessary costs.
The future of business rests on your network
As you can see, achieving your business goals means navigating a significant amount of network complexity. You need to reduce that complexity in your network, make management simple, increase visibility down to site level, and create a unified strategy aligned with your business’s strategic goals.
However, that’s not an easy process. But you don’t have to do it alone.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) like Expereo are uniquely positioned to tackle the network complexities that can hinder your business's growth and innovation. With the ability to provide connectivity solutions across 190 countries and a comprehensive suite of connectivity solutions, Expereo provides the expertise, infrastructure, and support needed to simplify even the most intricate enterprise networks.
By partnering with Expereo, businesses can eliminate the operational headaches associated with:
- Managing multiple providers.
- Inconsistent service levels.
- Complex billing structures.
- Expanding into new regions.
- Ensuring resilience and uptime.
We work with you to understand your connectivity needs down to site level as well as your business priorities overall. This allows us to shape a full connectivity strategy that is tailored to the unique needs of your business. Our end-to-end managed solutions ensure seamless connectivity across all your locations, offering a single point of accountability for your entire network ecosystem.
While we take the hassle out of network management, we don’t take away your control. With access to the expereoOne platform, you have complete visibility and control of all your sites and services at each individual site.
Get in touch today to discuss your needs and go faster to the future.