Author: Rose de Fremery
Date published: September 16, 2024
Digital transformation can be critical for enterprises wanting to be ready for the future. According to the 2023 Insight Intelligent Technology Report, around half of businesses (49%) say their ability to keep up with competitors on technological innovation is one of the greatest threats they will face over the next 12 months. Given the importance of the network to digital transformation, enterprises can benefit from greater network agility as they attempt to become as or more responsive than the competition. Here's a look at what agile networks are, how they can help deliver valuable business outcomes and how enterprises can create one.
Network agility allows a network to be flexible, resilient, intelligent, secure and capable of adapting to change. This crucial quality provides an enterprise with a future-ready foundation upon which it can continue to digitally transform and innovate. Agility was nominated as among the key priorities for CIOs.
In a networking context, agility often involves automation, rapid and scalable deployment of services, comprehensive visibility and streamlined yet robust security processes. Given the complexity and expansive nature of today's IT environments, networking teams certainly have their work cut out for them when it comes to building agile networks. Static models of network management and administration are burdensome, labor-intensive and may not adapt well to the ever-changing and unrelenting demands of a modern digital enterprise.
As noted in the State of the CIO Study 2024 by Foundry, an IDG, Inc. company, enterprises can find it difficult to implement strategic and innovative plans due to staff and skills shortages, changing business conditions and budgetary constraints. Agile networks can help IT teams overcome these obstacles and more effectively deliver on business priorities.
An agile network can help enable business strategy, even in the face of uncertainty and unexpected disruptions. Since these enterprises are committed to a course of continuous network transformations, they are also far more likely to invest with managed service providers (MSPs) in next-generation networking technologies such as Network as a Service (NaaS), hybrid networks and software-defined wide area networking (SD WAN).
According to PwC, businesses that use MSPs strategically to respond to opportunities and threats or to keep pace with changes in technology are 1.6 times more likely to be faster to market and 2.4 times more likely to be more innovative.
Enterprises seeking to learn more about how to improve network infrastructure will find they have several options for building an agile network. NaaS offers them one particularly effective approach. NaaS is a scalable, virtualized network that helps IT teams optimize resources, enhance performance and innovate for future growth.
Among the advantages of NaaS for enterprises is the ability to reconfigure networks on demand and add (or remove) new locations and capacity quickly. Further, the subscription model allows companies to align what they pay with what they actually use.
These benefits enable greater agility, particularly when compared to traditional network architecture that may not readily support automation, cannot easily scale and requires significant upfront capital investments.
NaaS also supports hybrid networks and SD WAN. Hybrid networks enable businesses to flexibly incorporate multiple forms of internet connectivity into their network architecture, delivering greater resilience and cost-effectiveness in the process. SD WAN effectively virtualizes an enterprise's wide area network infrastructure, providing the flexibility, automation and adaptivity that are typically associated with agile networks.
Having already discovered the benefits of digital transformation, enterprises are turning a spotlight on their networks—specifically, whether and how they enable business priorities. As part of this transition, they are building the capacity and resilience necessary to enable business strategy on a continuous basis, even when unexpected events and crises arise. Advanced networking solutions like NaaS are helping them navigate this crucial evolution in the time frame required, opening the door to steady and robust business growth.
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The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.