By Rahul Ambegaoker, Senior Director & Region Head, West, NTT Ltd. in India
No one fully foresaw the extent of the COVID-19 crisis. Businesses have been disrupted and will not necessarily go back to normal. Instead, the current disruption has changed and continues to change the business landscape as we know it. While many organizations envisioned various disaster scenarios, few anticipated the need for self-isolation and lockdowns at the scale we have experienced. Organizations are now looking to evolve and transform, especially as they rethink their digital strategy to remain competitive in the post pandemic world. However, the network, which is a critical enabler of success, all too frequently fails to be appropriately considered.
Data shows that when environments are managed proactively, it results in decreased operational complexity and cost. This frees up resources to focus on more critical transformation initiatives. Consequently, these businesses enjoy greater availability and critical outages are resolved much faster than in environments that are not managed. A well architected network is key to successful application delivery, irrespective of where it is hosted or how it is consumed.
Organizations are investing in next-generation strategic technologies such as ubiquitous wireless and software defined infrastructure. But they fail to consider the complexity, strategic nature and the inter-relationship of projects required to realize a more agile and automated approach to support the business. We have seen a 55.5% increase in business availability where clients use proactive support services. Automation and machine learning have further reduced the number of critical, business impacting incidents by 10.5 percentage points year-on-year.
At the same time, many businesses are choosing to continue to sweat network assets and to slow investment in re-architecting their on-premises network and security infrastructure. As a result, there has been an increase in obsolete and unpatched network devices containing software vulnerabilities, introducing risk, and exposing the organization to information security threats.
A robust network is the platform for your digital transformation
Cloud is not just an execution venue for your applications, it’s an operating model. Network technology, management techniques and financial models have evolved dramatically since the advent of cloud. This provides an opportunity for organizations to improve how their networks underpin business objectives.
The use of software-defined approaches and virtual networking, automation, and the inclusion of networking in DevOps operational models, together with capex, opex, subscription or perpetual licensing and as-a-service models have forever changed the networking landscape. Management of hybrid network infrastructure is more critical than ever given the increased complexity and the need to transform skills, while managing operational and security risk. A well-managed network infrastructure can deliver significant returns by taking care of your day-to-day activities, while maximizing the performance and availability of your network investments. Organizations that have invested in automated on-premise infrastructure have been reaping the benefits of delivering remote support more easily than those that have been sweating assets and relying on manual change control.
Using an ‘infrastructure as code’ approach allows for configuration and software compliance to ensure that the infrastructure is consistently configured, aligned with centralized policies, and supported through automated deployment and management tools. This will provide a non-repudiated configuration and deployment chain that allows the level of critical infrastructure assurance required by the business.
The evolution of the network must go hand in hand with digital transformation
We expect that this pandemic, and the measures that businesses have been forced to take, will result in permanent changes to the way they and their employees and customers operate and behave. For example, in many organizations, the merits of allowing people to work from home will be recognized and continue to be embraced.
Businesses will look to implement smart workspaces that accommodate social distancing within their physical office environments. During lockdown in India, many domestic internet service providers increased their capacity to meet the over-subscription for bandwidth on the part of housebound remote workers and students.
We expect that as we enter the ‘new normal’, this increased internet connectivity and capacity will be redirected in innovative ways such as gaming services and online media streaming and increased and improved online home learning and study solutions. Finally, trends that we have observed over the last few years – such as digital transformation – will be amplified and accelerated with the support of relevant and secure infrastructure, especially with respect to businesses’ technology, operational and financial initiatives.
We can predict a strong increase in cloud adoption to facilitate remote operations and to future proof organizations for adaptive consumption models. This will drive an increased demand for multi-cloud networking capabilities and skills. An increase in homeworkers will maintain the demand for remote access services that tie into an end-to-end secure software-defined WAN architecture that allows organizations to control their information security risk while ensuring better Software-defined infrastructure end-user experience.
