When ‘The Cloud’ began to gain traction as an attractive, cost effective and flexible deployment model for delivery
of business applications, there were many firms that decided the cloud was the right way forward for their business
and that the best way to start that journey was to build their own cloud infrastructure.
It was a mistake that most recognised pretty quickly as unrealistic goals hit hard against limited in house skill sets
and resources. But it is a lesson learned and a lesson that applies equally to self-build, liquid infrastructure software
defined network build outs.
Understanding the investments in the time needed to design and deploy the technology is therefore leading firms to
undertake their Digital Transformations in partnership with a service provider that already has in place these
network capabilities and is ready to make them available for enterprises in a simple yet comprehensive form.
So we believe that rather than build your own network the solution is to ‘consume’ ready-made carrier grade
services that can be customised, tailored and configured rapidly to meet the changing nature of user needs.
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2. Self-service does not equal on-demand
A pre-requisite of a Digital Transformation is to deliver speed to market. Time is a commercially critical commodity
and a self-service provisioning portal for deploying network services on demand is central to achieving that goal.
On demand and in near real time is the gold standard for network provision. The ability for Enterprises to select
data port locations, choose the required bandwidth over the circuit and have the service up and running in minutes
rather than weeks is now available.
The portal thus becomes the network management hub; adding, changing and upgrading circuits and port locations
as the business need changes. Of course management controls and measurements are built in.
For example, an activity history log and full integration to the supplier billing engine for accurate invoices are just the
required essentials in the portal feature list. Instead of the time taken to specify requirements and then waiting to
obtain quotations for different service options from your supplier the connection, rental and usage charges are
displayed on the portal screen. This means, for example you can immediately see the implications of upgrading a
circuit between say Berlin, London or Paris from 1Gbps to 10Gbps.
And say you need to upgrade that circuit bandwidth for just a month in anticipation of a short-term business need.
Now, instead of planning weeks ahead, ordering the upgrade and then being landed with an inflexible, longer term
than you need contract, you go to the portal the day you need the uplift and select your bandwidth requirement and
press the button. Minutes later you have what you want, know your cost and know you can switch it off when it is no
longer required without penalty.
That is what on demand means. Why would you settle for anything less?
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N e t wo r k i n g L e s s o n s f r o m C l o u d C o mp u t i n g
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