High-performance businesses need high-performance connectivity

Connectivity has embedded itself as one of the core foundations of our way of living, interacting, working, and learning, with around half the population of the planet already connected and more joining all the time. Our devices are becoming faster and cheaper, while network technologies such as 5G look to expand high-performance coverage wherever we may be. As businesses, there are a number of crucial shifts that we need to get to grips with:

•    Customers, suppliers, and partners have rapidly moved from physical to online and digital channels.
•    Remote and mobile working have become the default way to work wherever possible, and this looks to stay this way for most companies.
•    Increased adoption of public cloud to rapidly scale and accelerate the rollout of new capabilities and services.

With this shift to digital engagement and cloud, connectivity has become a key enabler for business continuity and resilience; secure "right-time, right-place, right-person" access; real-time data and insights; and creating pervasive and persistent digital experiences.

Networking interaction and technology

It's tempting to think that, with all the current networking adoption and technology advancements we have seen, connectivity is essentially sorted. The reality is that data flows are becoming fundamentally different to the assumptions we made just a few years ago.

Centralized campuses housing the majority of the workforce led to local datacenters with dedicated high-performance LANs with few workers needing to connect remotely to local apps and services. Suddenly the campus is mostly empty. Most users are connecting over the WAN, straining the infrastructure as we shift from an inside-out to an outside-in model. Existing network options are often not flexible enough to handle the new traffic model.
 

A digital hub of connected experiences

Apps are becoming more crucial to the business. From largely self-contained environments enabling back-office efficiency, these have spread to become the digital hub of new connected experiences responsible for driving revenue growth. With this also comes increasing integration with customers', suppliers', and partners' infrastructure and applications. IDC sees that most enterprise apps have connections to between 4 and 8 other applications — and connectivity is key to enabling this.

With over 80% of companies in Europe embracing public cloud to help deliver a hybrid IT approach to IT service delivery, optimizing connectivity directly into the public cloud providers' infrastructure is becoming ever more important.
 

What does it mean to your business then?

For your organization to succeed in connectivity, it should be looking to:
•    Have a choice of connectivity providers to ensure resilience and cost competitiveness
•    Minimize the potential impacts of connectivity performance variability on critical applications by looking to optimized internet or cloud connections
•    Manage bandwidth and traffic dynamically to ensure the best and most secure experience for customers, employees, and partners

So how do you achieve this in practice? Our research shows that one of the biggest enablers of improved connectivity is using a third-party datacenter platform provider that becomes the enabling hub in providing advanced connectivity for linking your IT infrastructure.

The top reasons for migrating to a third-party datacenter provider

If you're getting to grips with a huge amount of change in your on-premises IT infrastructure and looking to get on top of making it secure, efficient, and manageable, talking to a datacenter platform provider should be right at the top of your to-do list. To find out more, visit www.green.ch/en/transformation.