Investigate how data usage is currently set up and where data and applications live. Understand where your people are and what applications they’re accessing day-to-day. Throughout this process, you should ask yourself many questions, including the following questions:

• Where is your cloud?
• Where is your data?
• Where are your data centers?
• Where are you storing data compared to where your computing occurs?
• What elements is your network connecting?
• What kind of access to the cloud do you currently have? 

Taking the time to map out these elements provides a valuable birds-eye view of your network strategy and helps you formulate an idea for how to manage all the pieces of your network together for peak performance. Once you do so, it may quickly become clear which areas of your network are ripe for optimization.

To start acting on the new understanding of your data, you will need to upgrade your architecture with new technology, different providers and end-to-end management. There is no single network that reaches everywhere for all things, so in defining your transformed hybrid network, you must look at multiple network providers and service technologies, and then plan to manage those services cohesively for optimal connectivity. 

Based on the information map of where your people and customers are located and what clouds and data centers you use, research and design a network of services that solve for the usage at each location. Your transformed architecture will likely be a hybrid including a combination of fiber, Ethernet, and IP services. A hybrid network will also leverage existing services where they still work best and add the optimized new services to achieve the desired overall results.

A next-generation network provider can help you access these elements and optimize your cloud connectivity strategy based on your business’ needs. In researching the ideal partner, you should keep a few specific needs in mind. First, your provider should offer a broad portfolio of technology options—after all, no one technology is right for every location or business.

Second, you should prioritize a provider that relies on software-defined intelligence to monitor and route your workloads depending on traffic patterns and congestion points. With unified, end-to-end visibility, and service management across fiber, Ethernet, and IP services, the provider should be able to actively manage the bandwidth your business is using from each office location, to data centers, to all the private and public cloud instances your business relies on. 

On your way to a cloud-first transformation

As teams become even more reliant on the cloud to build and run their internal and external tools, a full-on connectivity crisis will emerge if organizations don’t manage their networks properly.

Thanks to technology’s increasing role in all our lives, application users are becoming even more accustomed to lower latency and higher performance in all the tools they use. Organizations that don’t hurry to take action on network transformation will eventually reach a tipping point where their unoptimized networks’ inability to function leaves them totally incapable of keeping pace with competitors.

The challenges posed by legacy infrastructure against ever-increasing cloud use pushes enterprises to get smarter about their cloud connectivity strategy. The right network transformation can provide a future-proof solution that will grow with enterprise business and its digital strategy.

With a software-defined interconnected network fabric, the WAN can be optimized and groomed as new services become available or new enterprise requirements are established. Delivering an agile, dynamic solution capable of seamlessly absorbing new technology innovations will keep your enterprise competitive for years to come.