Digital transformation has been on the lips of most technology executives since the personalization of IT started in the late 1990s. As a technologically knowledgeable workforce started to push the envelope to have the same level of digitization at the workplace as they have in their personal life, organizations are setting their sights on modernizing applications and technology infrastructure in a never-ending quest to keep pace with a changing technology landscape.
Unfortunately, a key component in delivering the user experience organizations crave for is often forgotten: the network, or the “unsung hero.”
Ensuring that the network can reliably and efficiently deliver data traffic to and from the cloud can make or break application performance, user experience and the ability of an organization to operate. But too often the network is something that IT doesn’t give a lot of attention to and often becomes an afterthought, until the day it doesn’t perform as expected.
What Does a Digital Transformation Entail?
First, let’s clarify what digital transformation means because the term has become broad and, depending on where you live in the IT ecosystem, means something different to each person.
Most of us define it as taking an application or work task and applying technology to that task to make it easier to use and to create better efficiencies, accuracy, and workflows.
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For managed network solutions providers, the meaning is more nuanced. A digital transformation is when an enterprise migrates data and applications to the cloud, establishing a modernized technology environment that takes advantage of the benefits of public cloud platforms. Very often, the lion’s share of the attention is spent ensuring functionality of applications in the new environment as well as enabling efficient access to massive amounts of enterprise data that now lives in the cloud.
But establishing the connectivity that enables what the industry calls the initial “lift and shift” and then adjusting it to fit the longer term needs of the business is an artform that requires experience, expertise and key partnerships.
Today, businesses are seeing a tremendous amount of benefit in shifting applications and data to the cloud, bringing on the most recent wave of digital transformation. As enterprise technology shifts from the highly controlled environment of the data center to public and hybrid cloud platforms, how do businesses deliver the promise of digital transformation to their organization seamlessly, simply, securely and cost effectively, while providing a user experience that enables users and businesses to operate efficiently?
Enterprises are migrating data and applications increasingly to the cloud as business needs change, workforces morph, and security becomes more important. Managed network service providers help with the “lift and shift” of data and applications while also establishing the right go-forward strategy for businesses to access these new environments seamlessly, providing a positive experience for their users. The result is improved application performance and reliable, secure connectivity.
Challenges to Consider When Going Digital
While examining the innovative approaches to digital transformation for businesses — including those developing fluid power- and electric-based motion systems — it is important to understand the challenges all organizations face when it comes to addressing this monumental paradigm shift in IT today and the role the network has in it.
Lack of Technology and Dedicated IT Skills
A dedicated, highly skilled IT team is essential to the success of any digital transformation project. But building such a team is becoming increasingly difficult, especially in the area of networking.
That’s why more and more organizations are looking to partners or managed services to help. The types of managed services any business may need along with the extensive list of vendors who supply them is extensive and ever changing. Finding a partner who understands the landscape and can deliver a best-of-breed approach can simplify the process where internal resources are thin.
Application Performance
Quite often when data center applications are moved to the cloud or planned to be moved to the cloud, they have to be re-written or optimized for that new environment. While the job of software engineers is to ensure that applications can access data and perform complex computations, a well-designed network ensures the smooth flow of traffic to and from the cloud environment. And if one of those elements is lagging, the user experience is similarly negative.
Though some applications like email and basic web use can be less sensitive to nuanced connectivity dynamics, applications that transmit voice or video can be a disaster when run over an improperly designed network. Public cloud environments are by nature distributed geographically and that is why often these applications, many of which are custom, need to be re-engineered to maintain their custom nature, sustain and even improve their performance, work seamlessly with other applications and data stored in the cloud, and preserve a high level of security.
It is important that enterprises understand this and are teaming with the right outsourced solutions provider who understands application performance and can optimize it from a network standpoint without a hiccup.
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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, on the other hand, 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.
The Role of Networks in Achieving Digital Transformation Goals
All these points are well and good, but how does the network play into all aspects of a digital transformation and how should an enterprise understand it? There are three key things to think about when factoring the role of the network into a digital transformation strategy:
1. Understanding the Network Drives the Customer Experience
In the end, regardless 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 which exist to provide the right solution. That’s 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.
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2. Expertise
It is exceedingly difficult to expect an IT department to have the breadth of expertise and knowledge to integrate all of 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.
3. Holistic Support
Again, few IT organizations have the network support that a holistic support model can provide for each element of the network infrastructure, security and traffic management elements. A topnotch 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 the digital transformation trend is not going away any time 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 a business for success will be highly dependent on the network.
Therefore, it will be necessary for IT departments have to better understand how important the network is to support digital transformation efforts and how best to maximize its effectiveness. To do so, they need to identify the right help and expertise to optimize and secure this “unsung hero” now and in the future.
This article was written and contributed by Mike Frane, Chief Product Officer at Nitel, a network-as-a-service provider.
