Modernizing the enterprise network: A connectivity strategy that delivers scale and innovation

welcome I'm Barbara call senior director of content strategy at CIO marketing services and I'll be your host for today's webcast titled modernizing the Enterprise Network building a connectivity strategy that delivers scale and Innovation for the future and brought to you by CIO and Spectrum Enterprise for the guest speaker from IDC I have two speakers with me today first up is Andrew Craver vice president Enterprise segment marketing at Spectrum Enterprise welcome Andrew tell us a little bit about yourself thanks Barbara I'm happy to be here I am responsible for spectrum Enterprises go to market planning across our client segments and that extends across the four Ps of marketing mix and really making sure that we're providing a customized experience for all of our client segments all right nice to have you and my second speaker is Paul Hughes research director at IDC welcome Paul tell us a little bit about yourself thanks Barbara and uh glad to be here I run ibc's future of connectiveness research practice I focus specifically on looking at how Enterprises are adopting Next Generation connectivity to address issues around agility performance and scalability so very happy to be here great nice to have you so gentlemen I'd like to kick things off by discussing the current state of the Enterprise as it relates to connectivity and transformation Paul what's your research showing in terms of key trends and expectations for the short and the medium term sure thanks Barbara um well our research is you know IDC does a lot of research looking specifically at the communications space and a nice Focus specifically on Enterprise connectivity and what we're finding is that no matter what vertical Market you look at we're seeing this just exponential growth of traffic as it relates to uh in the importance of managing smart devices hd's video and audio the impact on just extending business processes that help to basically bring greater focus on driving employee and user experience so with all of that together we're seeing this in we're seeing investment across the Enterprise of really bringing this enablement of connectivity that aligns machines devices sensors with the needs of the business so whether that be the employees focusing out to the customer delivering those kinds of personalized services or delivering a better user experience you know connectivity has become such a critical part I think of any transformation that's occurring and as a result this is also driving this virgins of I.T of Telco and of cloud coming together and as they converge there is this desire to bring all of these Technologies together to drive greater levels of performance scale and resiliency across the Enterprise and I think when you when you combine all of this together even in sort of the interesting times we're in uh the connectivity remains a significant priority for virtually any Enterprise that we talk to okay Andrew what do you see in terms of Trends and expectations with your Enterprise customers yeah we see and we hear pretty much exactly the same thing you know and it all starts with as Paul mentioned uh connectivity and so you know what we've seen is really an acceleration in the rate of uh expanded demand for for higher bandwidth speeds and uh you know I think it's it's clear that that also as Paul mentioned it's driven by uh increasingly more complex sort of value-added business applications being powered by Internet Protocol and you know probably a driver of this uh is the macro trends that we see arising from covid uh that certainly seem to be permanent fixtures of the Enterprise market today in terms of the hybrid work environment or the work from home environment that now has become more and more pervasive uh and this is this has really driven a need for flexible access to corporate Network assets and you know key business capabilities that are accessible both from home and from the office and often are stored and man is out of the cloud and so um the expectation that we hear from our from our client base is really you need to serve our our needs uh in terms of this this flexible work environment and really all of the implications that that has in terms of security and managed services to make sure that we're not adding to the the total cost of ownership for our clients in terms of you know the financial costs that that these bring to bear but also you know the stress that this can put on their internal I.T resources and stuff all right thank you so Paul I want to come back to you in your recent future of connectedness Enterprise survey what were some of the key motivators driving business and network transformation sure um I think a lot of it actually aligns with what Andrew was saying and that is in with these the survey that we sent out which is global in nature and looks and we asked a variety of questions specific to uh how organizations were trying to prioritize investment to an aligning that specifically around business outcomes what we found was and I don't think it's going to come as much of a surprise but you know there is a big shift towards cloud-enabled connectivity and infrastructure and a lot of with this move towards this cloud-first approach what it's doing is it's extending the overall Cloud strategy to really help Drive scale efficiency and griddles of performance across the Enterprise whether whether it's internal tools whether it's interacting with a customer and ensuring or or with a partner all of these Investments really play a critical role in ensuring that you know in the in the times that we're in particularly where hybrid work is very much here to stay even though we are seeing a lot of organizations bringing sort of folks back into the office with this sort of with return to office initiatives what it's still doing is it's forcing organizations to think about you know what are the how do they how do they address a lot of these critical issues so you know our survey data shows as you can see on the slide we've got about 30 34 of organizations are you know prioritizing that cloud first approach but you know just under that you know there is a there is a consistent focus and desire to you know manage to manage that hybrid work environment so consolidating and creating greater consistency across technologies that can help Drive employee productivity and collaboration so using those kinds of tools that help to eliminate a lot of those kind of classic data silos but also ensure that as organizations have to address the importance of managing increasing data volumes uh how all of that kind of ties to the need for investment across the network so as a result we're also seeing exist at you know continued focus and investment in the kinds of tools that bring that help provide greater levels of network insights in analytics and all of this of course has to be wrapped in security I think they're you're not going to see any I don't think you're going to see any IDC survey or any research survey where security is not always around you know at the top so all of these become kind of critical critical requirements for any any Focus around transformation going forward Andrew looking at this data what stands out to you from the Spectrum Enterprise side and does this resonate with what your clients are asking for well first off yes it certainly resonates and you know what stands out for me and you know if I sort of juxtapose that with what I hear from clients uh it's really that in delivering on the promise of the cloud it's absolutely critical to do that securely you know as as Paul mentioned security is is Paramount um you know I think it it's important to know uh the impact of covet on networking and sort of the macro Trends as I mentioned a minute ago that that has caused the sort of Ripple effects of that but I think we all saw that cyber attacks went up exponentially during covet and you know what drove that well it was increasing numbers of people accessing key corporate assets either on the cloud or on the network and doing so without really uh you know a plan behind that increase in that type of networking application so what we see is you know when it comes to the cloud are more Savvy technical buyers really prioritize doing uh doing all the things that it takes to get all that efficiency from the cloud architect architecture but doing it securely and private Cloud connectivity is is really a key to a lot of those a lot of those more advanced uh technical buyers um the other the other piece that we're seeing is in addition to the more well-known security implements out there you know such as a as a firewall or vdos Protection Service there are new security requirements including zero trust that are driving growth in in services and applications such as sassy to make sure that uh companies are able to lock down the access to those to those core corporate assets that are now being stored and accessed differently and you know really what it boils down to in terms of what we hear directly from our clients and sales engagements is the key is that it is is in finding a partner that can deliver all of this in a way that that isn't uh isn't more complex or more expensive all right thank you Paul as you look out over the next 12 months where do you see Enterprises focusing their connectivity Investments yeah it's a great question um as in both the res in both the primary and in the survey-based data research that I'm doing what I'm finding is that you know virtually every organization is looking at ways to one you know address to kind of address the issues of scale address the issues of security but also looking at ways to let to take advantage of network of the of cloud-based uh cloud-based infrastructure Network and services um that help move a lot of those critical functions to a cloud-based environment and in doing so what this does is it brings this new level of resiliency a new level of business continuity and access um across the across the organization and as a result and not surprisingly I mean our data shows that you know almost a quarter of Enterprises are sort of positioning that positioning this sort of cloud-first approach as kind of one of their core goals moving forward but not but you know closely aligned just below that is this real is this critical focus on productivity and you know as Andrew said you know with this with the focus of with the impact of coven in the pandemic you know there has been such a dramatic shift in the way that organizations think about how they use connectivity as a way to make the organization more agile and that means figuring out the kinds of tools and services that can ensure that your employees can connect all those critical systems can stay productive can share critical data across the organ across the organization to make those kinds of critical business decisions that are going to be important for the customer for the business so with all of that you know this this Focus around productivity and operational agility sort of rank system number two and I think that that kind of goes that goes hand in hand with this Desire by organizations to as they're looking at sort of connectivity as this sort of as a strategic uh component of driving agility in on all aspects of the business um you know making sure that the employees can stay productive really really brings a lot of that brings a lot of that to the Forefront and then I think third thirdly is the importance of as organizations are are going through this level of scale and as the network becomes more important and as connectivity becomes and the demands on the network increase as we start seeing more devices connecting to the network greater desire for bandwidth uh and the and the fact that or that employees may be connecting either on premise or off-premise the importance of understanding Network performance you know rank system ranks is number three so we see here about 16 of organizations uh were you know ranked were prioritizing Network performance so any kind of investment that keeps that critical data moving and optimizes network performance and reduces latency really become those become those critical priorities so I think you can kind of see from the the you know a lot of the the data on this slide that the real Focus going forward is on is on efficiency is on performance scale and productivity so aligning all of those together really are becoming those critical points that are going to help ensure that organizations can scale and can innovate in the coming years thank you Paul gray Andrew next next question is for you as you work with your Enterprise customers across key business verticals what are some of the key criteria they're looking for as they upgrade their networks and how is Spectrum Enterprise helping with products and services yeah great question so you know sticking with the theme um you know that demand for higher bandwidth is is really what powers all of these disparate um and really you know sort of fundamentally shifting applications that are changing the landscape so uh you know faster networks with lower latency in terms of the technologies that are specific to your question is key uh you know just an example of that is um I think all of us I can confidently say saw a drastic increase in the number of video calls we were on during covid and probably since then as well um and anyone that's been a part or a participant in a a a ucnc perhaps enabled video call uh with participant that had um a poor internet connection knows that that makes what has otherwise become sort of normal uh you know from a work environment standpoint become something that's that's a little bit tedious and makes you sort of uh you know wish you were in the office with somebody at that time so you know it all starts with faster networks and lower latency so that you can power all of those applications and sort of make it seamless in terms of of that acceleration of maintaining those key assets on the cloud that really comes with a need to integrate that cloud access with the rest of your networking and you know part of the way that we have enabled our clients in this regard is we have upgraded both of our core Network platforms Enterprise Network Edge and manage Network edge with uh dedicated private Cloud connections that go hand in glove the with the inherent sd-wan functionality that those platforms convey for users and then we talked about it a little bit uh on the a couple slides ago but in terms of network security it all comes down to uh that is the lowest common denominator in terms of value if you can't if you can't secure your Communications if you can't secure your intellectual protocol or excuse me intellectual property none of all of these these great functions and applications really are worth it it's just too much risk and so um you know really the whole the whole management of the attack Services that's expanded uh right along with the technology in terms of networking that's come about is uh the need for security that makes it all viable and so you know I mentioned sassy but uh you know there are other capabilities out there that go hand in love with sassy um in terms of in terms of conveying that confidence uh in the new way of working and with that comes a requirement for visibility and analytics that can actually show you in real time the health of your network the security of your network who is on your network and what they're accessing and then lastly remote work applications for the distributed Workforce um you know work from home uh it is is only going to be something that's viable for everybody if you can have the type of user experience that makes it pretty much seamless in terms of the comparison to the experience when you when you are working for the office and so the way that we've satisfied that requirement is by providing a teleworker service along with VPN access that would allow uh that does allow workers to have the exact same desktop experience that they would in the office okay thank you Andrew Paul my next question is for you what are you seeing from a business policy perspective and how are organizations addressing this change from both a technology and a staffing perspective what's a great question I think it aligns with everything Andrew is saying on the technology side with this shift as organizations go through this process of sort of looking across over there all these critical aspects of skill and Innovation and aligning a lot of the technology needs what we're finding and what I'm seeing is that you know most organizations are TR really need to align around this a true unified Enterprise migration approach to where they are updating Technologies through that are driven from a kind of a centralized with a centralized goal with decisions coming from the c-suite and I think what this does is you know particularly for larger organizations where you maybe whether you're multinational or you have uh you have different you've got um you've got offices you've got regions one of the critical things that becomes important is really creating a centralized strategy that as you're do as you're dealing with ensuring that you have the band you have that level of bandwidth to support the business as you have as you're moving towards you know cloud enabled networking as you're adopting security and Sassy that you're doing that on a consistent basis across all across the region so this means standardization of not just connectivity but of the tools of the solutions of the services that then that then become used across lines of business across regions uh and help to eliminate you know a lot of these sort of the traditional sort of data and networking silos that we've seen in the past all of this comes and has to be aligned with ensuring that as you think about the impact on human skills and on Staffing and it's important that as as all of these changes come into play that that that your I.T staff that your network staff and even all of your employees have an understanding of how they can actually maximize the value of all of this connectivity that's coming into play uh and I think this is something where as we start seeing kind of the investment in areas like sd-wan Edge embracing you know greater levels of Mobility it's important that organizations think about and work and actually and work with their technology providers to ensure that you know that that part of the goal for dry having you know to driving Innovation is that employees maximize the benefit that they can get out of it and then lastly I think what also is very important is is of course is tracking and measurement and there when we think about all of these Investments uh in all in aligning sort in aligning kind of these new technologies to drug to drive uh greater performance you know it's tracking and measuring the performance benefits and this is particular particularly now as we see organizations embracing uh embracing sd-wan embracing Edge and and management and manage Network Services you know using and aligning these expectations with the investment expectations with the business needs these all become critical as organizations are looking at you know using these these new technologies to increase their level of agility okay great Paul you mentioned managed Network Services and this is a key area of focus for spectrum Enterprise so Andrew my question is for you can you talk about Spectrum Enterprises approach for managed Network Services and how your customers can become more agile as a result absolutely so you know at the highest level our approach to managed Network Services is to is to take the complexity out of putting together all these solutions that we've been talking about thus far uh take that out of our clients uh sort of thing list of things to worry about and and leave the management of all of those uh all of those capabilities to us and so you know this this is valuable for a number of reasons one is that it solves a skill Gap issue and you know most most specifically uh if you think about it resources which we all know are both expensive and constrained uh you know they have a lot of mobility in terms of you know being able to sort of you know command not only a high salary but but uh you know in what industry they want to work in so if you think about that and then you think about um you know as an Enterprise business leader trying to find an I.T resource

that can both be an expert in whatever your your native business is but also in Advanced networking cyber security you know keeping up with Cutting Edge Technologies like sassy for example or you know how how to set up teleworkers in a secure way it's really hard to find that that singular resource that can do all those things and frankly that wants to do all of those things so really in terms of solving the skill Gap issue for our clients what we're really doing there is allowing our clients to take advantage of the advantages that we can convey in terms of scale and networking focused expertise and in so doing we allow them to focus their I.T staff on their Core Business uh and make it a little easier to find that resource that can fill their needs um and you know the next value piece for us is really being able to be that single provider and to provide that that single solution you know so many of our clients have have multiple balls in there at any given time and uh more than you would you would probably expect have multiple provider environments from it from a security networking connectivity perspective and so uh you know the ability to do business with a single provider is something that really allows them again to to reallocate that Focus towards their Core Business and making sure they're doing everything they need to do to be successful um and then refocusing I.T on business outcomes uh you know from design to deployment um you know what what we're looking at here is refocusing I.T on the deliverables that they are um that they're responsible for and mapping to those kpis the measurements that Paul mentioned from a from an infrastructure management perspective when you when you choose to purchase one of our managed Services everything from design to the implementation to the ongoing monitoring and management is is uh something that you can leave to us and um that again allows you to move your focus towards your core business and uh while enjoying all the benefits that come along with all the solutions that I've already mentioned uh that allows you to operate in the new business environment and the networking aspects that are required today um and then scalability um you know one thing that we saw during covid was a lot of our clients uh were taken by surprise uh in terms of the the vast increase in the bandwidth that they required to run their business and and that was you know in large part due to so many of their employees now accessing you know key applications remotely which uh which chews up the bandwidth and so um deployment of our ultra high speed Data Network which which scales all the way from 25 Meg all the way up to 100 Gig is really something that allows clients to to have peace of mind that when they establish connectivity with us uh they're they're not going to be in a position where they're not able to scale uh you know their business needs uh to the bandwidth requirements they've got in addition to that the the network platforms that we offer allow extensibility from uh you know anything as simple as a managed firewall all the way up to um you know iot device management combined with with cameras for for physical security capabilities and then the last piece which I think is especially valuable in today's Financial environment and the uncertainty that many businesses find themselves in as a result is that we subscribe to an approach that that we call the Opex model which really allows our clients to Avail themselves at the point where they're turning up a new network um of all of the expensive networking Hardware that that requires available to them at at uh you know the subscription costs for the service as opposed to deploying um Capital uh against that Network hardware and so what that allows them what that allows our clients to do from a value perspective is really not just allocate those those constrained I.T resources towards their core business but also their capital investment and in so doing not have to not having to make a trade-off in the future of their business their business and investing in that versus having a secure High performing Network okay thank you so Andrew and Paul you've both provided a lot of great Insight on how Enterprises can use connectivity to modernize their current businesses and operations to wrap things up Paul you and the IDC research team published a variety of predictions around technology and investment for the coming five years where will organizations Focus future connectivity Investments for scale and innovation yeah great question um so this what I thought I would do is share a couple of our future Escape predictions and and all of these really align to how organizations are thinking about and where we think organizations are going to go as it relates to their investment their strategy or around Network and I.T uh and you know in these

four in these four uh in these four predictions you know in a in the very short term we're seeing we're expecting to see you know about 40 of Enterprises are going to be really focusing on driving that driving a new level of efficient operational efficiency and security by using SQL using sd-wan and adopting sd-wan and security uh as a way to to leverage that cloud managed networking and security this becomes one of those critical technology areas that I think we see is going to have a dramatic impact on the Enterprise both from a cost and from a performance perspective along with that however it's I think it's important to highlight that we've talked a lot about sort of the human skills and the change and the changes that are occurring you know we're also expecting you know within within two within the next two years you know about about about 30 of our Enterprises are going to be looking at looking at Network attentiveness across all other it teams and this becomes something that you know as as we consider the importance of security devops aiops and using and how all of this is impacting the change on the Enterprise that there's there's this importance for organizations to think about how do they how do they align a lot of those connectivity Investments with skills developments and the way that you know their their employees uh can are are becoming much more aligned around business outcomes as opposed to sort of tactical changes and so that becomes one another one is critical areas within within three Within by by 2025 uh we're expecting to see you know organizations that have embraced that with that digital approach are going to be augmenting this this goal of the cloud first with what we call this multi-network this multi-access network Fabric and this is where you think about the impact of of network resiliency and business continuity and resiliency or what we believe is that you know there is such an importance for organizations to think about you know con the multi-access connectivity and using all of these diverse Technologies to ensure that all of those Mission critical processes uh can move forward you know Andrew mentioned Telehealth but you also think about you know any of these Smart Industries you know smart agriculture smart uh smart trans um smart uh manufacturing the critical nature of ensuring that you have adequate bandwidth and capabilities to ensure that the business can stay connected in many cases you know any issue that comes from any type of network issue and have a direct impact on the business so the importance of bringing that this this network Fabric and enabling that becomes a critical importance uh and then lastly and I think it aligns with everything we've been talking about today is that you know by you know most so many organizations are investing their I.T budgets you know to focus around connectivity and security but a lot of them are going to be using a lot of these assets to embrace their own smart products and so the what we've what we're going to see in the next three in the next three to five years is how you know organizations are using not just sd-wan but they're going to be looking at sort of the future rollout of kind of and the future benefits of their investments in connectivity and security to help deliver much more Innovative products and services and this relates to their own as a service you know cloud-enabled products or again their own their own smart products and services that bring a lot of those key capabilities to the market so I think a lot of we're gonna we're gonna see over time the connectivity becomes such a critical component of this entire strategy towards skill and Innovation and you can kind of see it in these predictions all right thank you Paul very interesting we close Andrew would you like to give us a quick overview of spectrum Enterprise absolutely so who is Spectrum Enterprise uh we are part of Charter Communications and we're a national provider of Enterprise Technology Solutions and we serve some of the country's biggest brands in fact 83 of the Fortune 500 relies on us for Technology Solutions and we talked about it a bit today but just to reiterate we combined our our world-class fiber network with a broad set of capabilities which include a number of Wan Technologies managed Services security and collaboration tools and we really pride ourselves on standing apart from other providers by tailoring our solutions to clients needs um and what we hear from the clients that that choose us is we provide a differentiated experience we do not take a one-size-fits-all approach uh the way that a lot of our competitors do and we purposefully build solutions that are extensible and can grow with your requirements and the nature of technology so we think ahead to deliver for you today while planning for the future um and uh we operate one of the largest networks in the US and a couple of indications of that where the number three U.S provider of fiber lit buildings were the number three U.S

ethernet provider in terms of share and we certainly have the expertise to deliver against all of your needs thank you both that's all the time we have for today I'd like to thank my guests Andrew Craver of spectrum Enterprise and Paul Hughes of IDC and thanks to you our audience for joining us for additional information on this topic please visit the resources section on your screen for CIO and Spectrum Enterprise I'm Barbara call

2023-09-21 21:06

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