a deep understanding of the markets they serve and are able to leverage relationships in those markets. Furthermore, transparent communication throughout the service delivery process will become a key consideration for TSBs in the coming year. Finally, TSBs will recommend providers whose service delivery teams take responsibility for a solution from implementation to operation to ensure that solution functions as designed within a customer’s IT environment.

Scalable Bandwidth

The demand for scalable, high-capacity bandwidth will only increase as multinational enterprises strive to cost-effectively serve diverse application needs, improve performance, and maintain customer satisfaction across a multi-cloud environment. TSBs will push to understand how connectivity services are optimized to serve those needs through the recent development of open network architecture and coherent pluggable components.

Coherent pluggable components are now essential for meeting rising bandwidth demand in data centers, cloud computing, and high-speed applications (AI and video), driving significant value for enterprise customers by enhancing power efficiency and cost savings without sacrificing capacity, performance, or scalability. In 2024, connectivity services enabled by coherent pluggables will help enterprises unlock numerous use cases, including increased access to data centers and multi-cloud sites, disaster recovery, and data replication.

Reliability on a Global Scale for Performance and Security

Multinational enterprises are generating more traffic and pushing applications over the Internet than ever before, and that trend will continue in 2024. Reliable performance and security on a global scale are crucial for business success. However, with increased SD-WAN deployments, many enterprises will find that providers’ underlying networks lack performance and security because they are pieced together through acquisitions. In other cases, carriers will diversify their portfolio so much that they will lack expertise in delivering high-performance connectivity. Furthermore, many providers only offer network security (like DDoS) as an “add-on” when in fact, it should be a foundational network element (i.e., part of the connectivity package) in 2024’s global threat landscape.

To meet 2024’s difficulties, TSBs will work to understand a carrier’s network evolution and evaluate their track record in solving the performance and security problems associated with global service delivery. To address network security specifically, TSBs will prioritize global DDoS mitigation that is native to all the potential networking services of a provider.

Responsive and Knowledgeable Customer Service Resources

Excellent service delivery experiences are the starting point, but a sustainable partnership with a global enterprise must be built on a provider’s long-term commitment to customer service. As a result, customer service will continue to be a major focus of TSBs when evaluating connectivity partners. They will evaluate if customer service is a core part of a carrier’s business and culture, including third-party measurements to validate its customers’ trust in their services. This trust extends to both the provider’s SLA and their ability to demonstrate that their overall support process will deliver responsiveness and transparency during a service-impacting problem.

In 2024, simplicity will become the defining quality of customer service resources, as the traditional gauntlet of portals and credentials will be consolidated. To provide value to enterprises, TSBs will choose connectivity services that can be accessed through either: 1) a single service portal that provides full transparency of service tickets, real-time network analytics and traffic graphs, or 2) open APIs that can integrate directly into the customer’s IPSM platform.

Focus on what Matters: Performance, Trust, and Transparency

As we head into 2024, enterprises will continue to face challenges related to the cost and complexity of application performance across multi-site and multi-cloud footprint, combined with the risks of global service delivery and increased security threats on a global scale. To help enterprises overcome these challenges, TSBs will recommend global connectivity providers that demonstrate effective service delivery/customer support processes, while transparently sharing all data in a way that best suits the customer’s business need. In addition, a provider’s ability to scale and show measurable network performance will go a long way in mitigating the perceived risk of an enterprise seeking to change providers.