Optimising infrastructure – the bumps in the road
Infrastructure transformation must allow organisations to innovate and compete in the global marketplace.
Despite the economic downturn, CCS Insight research carried out in July 2020 found digital transformation efforts accelerating, with almost two-thirds of businesses expecting their IT budgets to increase in the next 12 months. Businesses highlighted cloud computing and remote collaboration as technologies they are investing in.
During the onset of the pandemic, businesses focused on remote working, ecommerce and automating supply chain processes. It became more important than ever to create a flexible and agile business, while protecting core systems. Many global businesses know they need to change to compete in their sector – but they face challenges refreshing digital infrastructures:
Challenge 1: The network must add value and drive the business.
It’s great to have a secure, functioning network, but that’s no longer enough. Network infrastructure must allow businesses to differentiate from the competition and adapt to market demands. But that can only happen if businesses review their goals regularly. Before the pandemic, geographical expansion, customer engagement and achieving operating efficiencies may have been key strategic drivers. Now, priorities have changed.
Digital transformation is key to providing ever greater bandwidth, improved user and customer experience, all without compromising security. If you can’t achieve these goals, your business will fall behind. Digital technologies, such as software as a service or unified comms, allow companies to launch new apps or to on-board cloud services securely, making it easy to expand quickly into new geographies or markets.
Vignesh Dumonceau, CFO at Flex Precision Plastics, says: “We are in the manufacturing business where technology and quality are extremely important components. For us, the first driver for digital transformation is the ability to take decisions that could improve cost efficiency. The second is meeting customer needs. More and more customers are asking for real-time data. And the third driver is to free up employees and stakeholders from repetitive and transactional tasks, so they have more time to provide better qualitative inputs.”
Technologies such as hybrid WANs, software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) are simplifying previously complex network infrastructure development. They allow businesses to set up networks in hours rather than weeks. Nico Strina, Head of Super Network Infrastructure at Twilio, says: “What is changing for us is taking something very complex and making it something that everybody can use.”
Successful digital transformation also demands a cultural change. At the same time, businesses must keep on targeting operational efficiencies. Lars Jerkland, VP Ecosystem Partners at Asavie, points out: “Video conferencing has been around forever. Yet, we have still been travelling like crazy and flying to face-to-face meetings. We just had to push the user adoption of these technologies. And as we adopt them more, we're finding new ways of working. And I think those new ways of working will drive the technology transformation.”
Quang Phuong, Director of Network Engineering | HedgeServ
The global pandemic has woken everyone up to working from home. It's put a lot of stress on the network infrastructure.
Challenge 2: Tackling complexity and cost
Enterprise infrastructures are getting more complex – and potentially more expensive. Networks need to be optimised to support business applications and increased data. Global enterprises face the challenge of transforming infrastructures across hundreds of sites, across multiple geographies. Sometimes, merger and acquisition activity drives the need for change.
Analyst firm Gartner highlights common barriers to network optimisation. These include enterprises being blocked by network service providers’ terms and conditions and companies moving applications to public cloud services, meeting application performance issues. Legacy manual processes and cultural resistance also impede agility.
Network optimisation can drive cost efficiency. But the network must make it easy for the business to become competitive – in a way that doesn’t create new vulnerabilities or cause repercussions to IT and cloud initiatives. The network must be able to evolve to adopt the latest updates and technology changes and to roll out new business applications optimally. The ideal is to reduce complexity – but that in itself is a complex challenge.
Stephen Byrne, IS Director, Global Data Centre Services | Stryker
Network efficiency and optimisation has allowed us to reduce our data centre footprint globally. We have been able to consolidate data centres in Asia.
Analyst firm Ovum has found that a large majority of enterprise executives considering software-defined networking at first assumed that deployment and self-management is easy: “Enterprises may be sold on the benefits of centralized controllers, zero-touch provisioning, and easy management under a ‘single pane of glass’. They have yet to experience separate underlay and overlay layers, variations in on-net versus off-net visibility, the management headaches of aggregating carriers, the complexity of hosting SD-WAN controllers, or dealing with applications performance troubleshooting”.
Vignesh Dumonceau believes that tackling data is the best starting point to address network optimisation complexity. He says: “Data and digitization are our future. If we don't have that, we are not able to make the right decisions. From a network optimization standpoint, the first challenge is the data. You need to have complete and accurate data.”
Nico Strina, Head of Super Network Infrastructure | Twilio
It’s easier to drive business and attract a different set of customers as the telecom industry was too complex before. Now it’s telecoms for everyone. The competitive advantage comes from solving the legacy issue for customers.
Challenge 3: Moving to the cloud
Legacy infrastructure issues are driving organisations to consider cloud-based network software. IDC says 80% of enterprises were predicted to have implemented SD-WAN at some of their sites by 2020. Migration plans, in many cases, are accelerating to support companies changing their ways of working in the pandemic.
Barriers to migration include security concerns, costs and sourcing the right skills. Businesses often feel pressured to move towards cloud services before their legacy infrastructure is ‘cloud-ready’.
Nicolas Fischbach,
Global CTO |
Forcepoint
We are seeing a shift to the cloud, digital transformation, industry 4.0. It’s happening in all the markets we are present in. For a very long time, there was a pushback from the C level resisting the move to the cloud, because there was a lack of trust in cloud services. This has changed since the pandemic.
Quang Phuong, Director of Network Engineering at HedgeServ, is spearheading a move to the cloud: “We are always trying to challenge and reassess the situation and come up with new solutions, because this environment changes very fast. My goal for the next quarter is moving away from traditional MPLS dedicated networks, and moving to an internet base, where it’s so much cheaper to get internet circuits than it is to buy dedicated circuits.”
“Cloud is important, but it’s not the only way,” according to Cooper Chien, IT Director at Huawei Technologies. He says: “I believe that the adoption of cloud has challenges. Number one is trust. No one wants to put a company’s confidential data on the cloud from day one. Yet, the most successful companies will adopt cloud faster to reduce the total cost of ownership. Instead of high CAPEX to purchase a lot of hardware, pay the OPEX of cloud rental. A hybrid approach will become more and more popular, as cloud infrastructure becomes more mature.”
Nicolas Fischbach,
Global CTO |
Forcepoint
My transformation to secure SD-WAN from private WAN services paid for itself and gave me £600K to spend on something else every year.
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