Does your network do what it says on the tin?

About ten years ago, the cloud may have been simply a way for the IT team to cut costs, but it has since evolved into an indispensable platform for businesses. It plays a crucial, strategic role in enabling them to introduce new services more quickly, boost efficiencies, expand to new markets, and enhance customer engagement.

It is also a key ingredient in many applications, such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and big data analytics, which businesses are using to drive digital transformation in all their operations.

Yet, in today’s cloud-first age – where anywhere, anytime access to data and applications is a must –the shortcomings of an enterprise network can become rapidly exposed. Simply put, a traditional private WAN is too inflexible and expensive for the cloud, while the public Internet can’t meet businesses’ demands for secure, reliable performance.

That is why more and more of our customers are adopting hybrid networks, which give them the best of both worlds – the reliability and security of a private network, with the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the public Internet.

But it doesn’t stop there. Many businesses are also opting to work with specialist connectivity providers to ensure a more predictable network performance when accessing major clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce.

Enterprises have become accustomed to using these cloud services ‘pay-as-you-go’, without upfront investment – and recently they’ve started to expect that same flexibility from their network services too: no-strings-attached.

A couple of examples of our customers that have reaped the benefits of rethinking their network set-up for the cloud are Client Instant Access, a major provider of conferencing, dialling and messaging services, and Cognizant, a US-based, Nasdaq-listed IT services business.

Client Instant Access was seeing a surge in demand for its products and services worldwide, but its growth was being held back by a complex mix of point-to-point TDM circuits and physical servers in inflexible data centres. To boost the agility of the business, the company adopted IZO Private Connect for its voice services, with virtual servers in the AWS cloud. Adopting AWS and IZO Private Connect has not only reduced costs for Client Instant Access by eliminating the need to maintain physical servers and data centres – it has also given the company unprecedented ability to scale to meet customer demand in virtually any timescale. The numbers speak for themselves: Client Instant Access saw an almost 20% increase in usage in the quarter following the deployment, thanks to an enhanced customer experience. Furthermore, the company now needs to spend a lot less time on troubleshooting issues, allowing it to focus its efforts on adding value for its customers instead.

Like many of our customers, Cognizant faced the challenge of striking the right balance between offering its clients a speedy, secure and reliable user experience while at the same time minimising operating costs and increasing resource efficiency. That’s why the global IT services provider decided to stop using the public Internet to access AWS cloud and adopt IZO Private Connect instead. This move has lowered the total cost of ownership for Cognizant, boosting resource efficiency. Crucially, it ensures that the company’s clients can use AWS with the peace of mind that a robust, secure and scalable network infrastructure brings.

Words like ‘secure’, ‘reliable’, ‘scalable’, ‘high-speed’ and ‘high-performance’ are perhaps over-used in our industry, leading to scepticism amongst CIOs. To make it easier for them to determine whether a network services provider’s offering does what it says on the tin, AWS recently introduced a new competency framework for its networking partners.

We’re delighted to be one of only a handful of companies in the world that has been able to meet AWS’ criteria, and become an inaugural AWS Networking Competency Launch Partner. And, we’re committed to continuing to invest in our networking capabilities to be able to support our customers’ digital transformation through the cloud.

Learn more about how to build a cloud-ready global network for your business.