Uptime and resiliency of
the cloud environment

Because of the distributed nature of public cloud environments, if one data center goes down, that doesn’t mean the enterprise operation goes down. All public cloud environments are architected with multiple redundancies and failovers that prevent against costly downtime. The uptime and resiliency of the cloud environment is unmatched and provides enterprise customers with peace of mind and lets them rely on the cloud operations to correct any problems, unlike owning and managing one’s own data center.

Management and support

Managing applications and data sitting in one’s data center requires constant supervision. Server maintenance, software upgrades and security concerns are just a few of the issues that keep IT staff up at night and require internal resources to manage. While the networks traditionally used to access data centers are generally reliable and secure, they are notoriously costly and inflexible. Public cloud environments operated and maintained by managed network service providers take away many of the headaches IT executives have had to deal with over the years.

Budget concerns and constraints

A digital transformation effort that leverages a public cloud environment is attractive to enterprise CFOs who are concerned about the financial implications of such a large undertaking. Funding is always a concern when it comes to technology and as digital implementations are always susceptible to “scope creep,” they can become quite costly. However, moving from purchased servers and databases to rented space in a public cloud reduces capital expense and shifts spending to an operating expense model. Budgeting becomes more predictable and manageable, which financial managers prefer. This model also fits neatly with the existing service model already employed by managed network service providers.

All these points are well and good, but how does the network play into all aspects of digital transformation? How should an enterprise understand it? From our point of view, there are three key things to think about when factoring the role of the network into digital transformation.

Understanding the network drives the customer experience

In the end, regardless of how the network fits into the overall digital transformation landscape, it is the customer experience that counts. The customer doesn’t need to understand what networks are available and where they reside, nor the myriad of technologies that exist to provide the right solution. This is best left to those with a proven history of expertise in such things. What is important is to be assured the performance of the network will be there given the unique business applications and processes a particular enterprise demands and that the network has a level of predictability. Without predictability, or consistency of performance, ensuring the right application experience can be elusive. Getting expertise in this area from a managed network solutions provider can be invaluable, given their expertise and history with network management and implementations. They can simplify the complex while delivering high-performing network solutions to enterprises, so the user experience is productive and valuable.

Expertise

It is exceedingly difficult to expect an IT department to have the breadth of expertise and knowledge to integrate all these disparate network elements. Understanding the infrastructure, security, network management, and private connectivity to the cloud is where a managed network service provider can provide the right kind of help to optimize network services for a particular enterprise’s digital transformation needs.

Holistic support

Again, few IT organizations have the network support that a holistic support model can provide for each of the network infrastructure, security and traffic management elements. A top-notch managed network service provider solution should be able to deliver a universal or holistic perspective to each environment to deliver the best services possible.

While digital transformation is a trend that is not going away anytime soon, demands on the network to support it will be even greater as more organizations look for better performance out of their IT infrastructure and digital assets. Utilizing data better and more efficiently—and ensuring that digitization helps transform business for success—will be highly dependent on the network. IT departments must better understand how important the network is to support digital transformation and how best to support maximizing its effectiveness. To do so, they need to identify the right help and expertise to optimize and secure this “unsung hero” in supporting digital transformation now and in the future.