The On Demand Business: leading the way to a new digital world
The On Demand
Business: Enterprise
connectivity for the
digital era
According to IDC, “as public
and private cloud use continues
to grow, WAN performance
becomes critical to latencysensitive and mission-critical
workloads and inter-datacentre
business continuity.”
Accordingly, as enterprises plan
and implement comprehensive
cloud strategies, WAN
architectures need to be
considered alongside, and in
conjunction with, datacentre
infrastructure. Moreover, as
enterprises move business
processes to the cloud, there
is a greater need to fully
integrate cloud-sourced services
into WAN environments to
ensure workload/application
performance, availability, and
security.
Intelligent enterprises are
software driven
To address these issues, global
business are now tapping into
the power of next-generation
network technologies like SDN
(Software Defined Networking)
and NFV (Network Functions
Virtualisation). Analysts note that
software-defined networking
has already started to prove
its worth in the datacentre
by helping to improve agility
and responsiveness – ensuring
that datacentre networks can
better meet the needs and
demands, as well as match the
benefits of cloud computing.
The focus is now shifting toward
wide area networks, which
can also be optimised to meet
the requirements of cloud
applications and services.
On Demand networks allow
enterprises to concentrate on
core business
The adoption of an intelligent,
software-defined network,
means less time and resource
spent on managing the network,
and more time and resource to
concentrate on core business,
while benefitting from the
visibility, agility and flexibility
typically only found in a selfmanaged solution. Significant
up-front capital expenditure
is effectively eliminated and
enterprises benefit from the
budgetary certainty of having
regular, predictable payments
for the service. There is the
additional benefit of allowing
customers to dynamically scale
up or down WAN bandwidth in
line with core business needs.
Thus efficiency is enhanced as
the legacy practice of wasteful
over-procurement of physical
network ports is consigned to
history and customers only pay
for what they need. This model
has the added advantage that
the management overhead
associated with ordering and
managing multiple software
licences for network equipment
is no longer a time-consuming
headache for enterprises.
Selecting network services
that can deliver enhanced
levels of agility offers vital
competitive advantage in
today’s fast-paced business
world, according to Carl
Grivner, CEO, Colt Technology
Services. “The network is
the critical link to achieving
a business’s key objectives,
but international expansion,
mergers, acquisitions, cloud
adoption and wide-ranging
integration all require network
capacity that scales with
the business. An intelligent
network becomes an asset,
with the capability to address
mixed end-user and customer
requirements, promoting
on-demand distribution and
consumption – to the right
person at the right time,
even anticipating future
requirements,” he said.
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The On Demand
Business: Enterprise
connectivity for the
digital era
“We are now able to build
intelligence in, around and
through the network, creating
a service that is ‘bandwidth
requirement intelligent’ for
the end user but is enabled
by automated collective
management for the operator.
This is a resource which
allows an organisation to
dynamically provision, or selfprovision, according to real
time business requirements,
which themselves are
increasingly driven by user
expectations and demands.
Technologically this is a new
era, but economically and
commercially it’s even bigger
than that.”
On demand: leading the way to a
new digital world
The bottom line is clear: as
today’s enterprises fully embrace
digital transformation, wide area
network bandwidth is becoming
an ever-more critical requirement,
a vital commodity in the same
category as basic utilities such
as power and water. In the
emerging information-intensive
economy, where ‘Uberfication’ is
causing disruption in every sector,
bandwidth must be delivered in a
flexible and timely fashion where
and when it is most needed. To
facilitate this, global enterprises
are taking control of their wide
area networks and upgrading
these critical resources to become
truly digitally enabled.
But with an explosion in cloud
services taking place, traditional
data center interconnect
services such as Wave and
Ethernet don’t offer the flexibility
some enterprises need to
interconnect multiple data
center locations. Such drivers
are changing requirements for
bandwidth, and the need to
change interconnection points
periodically.
In the era of the cloud, rather than
the legacy practice of buying or
building, and maintaining wide
area network infrastructure inhouse, forward-looking corporates
are partnering with trusted thirdparty service providers to benefit
from the flexibility of on-demand
carrier-grade services. Software is
making the network more flexible,
intelligent and better aligned to
core business objectives and this
in turn is giving enterprises the
ability to maximise agility and
power the digital transformation
initiatives that are essential for
future success.
IDC predicts that by using
network on demand, organisations
will be able to reduce their total
cost of operations related to their
networking environments by an
average of 10–28% compared with
buying and operating the network
equipment themselves.
However, while cost is often
cited as a main benefit of the on
demand network, a significant
proportion of organisations
– around 18% according to
one study by Spanish analyst
TPNET – see the main benefit
as a reduction of resources such
as staff for management of the
network, and also the flexibility
to apply seasonal variations of
network use as needed, to cater
to key events or peak usage times.
Consider the benefits automation
has provided to mass market
automobile consumers, enabling
demands to be met from multiple
car models to customised features
and colours. Applied to the
network, imagine the services that
automation could enable, allowing
businesses to further evolve their
own portfolio; imagine how endconsumers could purchase those
services in this digital era.
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