27 November 2017

Peter Coppens, VP Product, Colt

Increasingly, CIOs are looking to network infrastructure to drive digital transformation and business objectives. Enterprises are waking up to the fact that technology often underpins core business activity like international expansion, mergers, acquisitions and migrating to the cloud. These dynamic processes need network capacity to scale up and down as business activity fluctuates.

As organisations pursue growth and plug in to worldwide markets, many are using multiple data centre sites nationally and internationally. More extensive global footprints mean that network requirements for a cloud-only era go beyond a single connection to a single enterprise. 

To power the digital transformation of today’s global businesses, dynamic real-time ordering, provisioning and flexing of high bandwidth connectivity between sites is essential. With long lead-time, fixed bandwidth circuits and expensive long-term contracts, traditional ways of delivering services like Ethernet and Wavelength won’t always cut it. When businesses are looking to scale, networks and connectivity need to do more than keep the lights on. A ‘liquid infrastructure’ and an intelligent virtualised network can help flex bandwidth between different sites accordingly.

Recognising this, forward-looking corporations are increasingly looking to third-party service providers offering a flexible consumption model and the combination of SDN and NFV technology, allowing for the instant provisioning of network connections between locations, and the scaling of bandwidth in real time. 

This kind of functionality is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for organisations with goals for digital transformation. Consistently evolving real-time business requirements mean that on-demand models are essential if companies are to intelligently and efficiently meet short-term, ad hoc demands for high-bandwidth applications. The option of per-hour pricing plans as well as traditional fixed-term contracts also helps businesses to operate with agility.

With a liquid infrastructure, enterprises are released from the burden of provisioning connectivity themselves, and they can focus on so much more than just ‘keeping the lights on’. An intelligent network can add real, quantifiable value to a business and free up teams to work towards core business objectives, all the while knowing that company connectivity is best positioned to power digital transformation initiatives that are essential to future success.