Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy - Home & Business … · 2019-04-25 ·...

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eBook Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy

Transcript of Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy - Home & Business … · 2019-04-25 ·...

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eBook Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy

Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy

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eBook Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy

Contents

The Rise of the Digital Transformation 3

Hybrid IT — Your Launchpad 4

In the Spotlight: Which IT Services Should Be Managed? 4

The Network — A Fundamental Asset 6

Technology Innovation Underpinning 21st Century Network 7

In the Spotlight: Software-Defined WAN 8

Leveraging Your Network for Voice Services 9

Balance and Simplicity at the Core of Your Hybrid IT Environment 10

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eBook Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy

Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network StrategyThe Rise of the Digital Transformation

Organizations everywhere are embarking on Digital

Transformations — going beyond simple automation and

cost savings to reach into new areas, revolutionizing their

business models, and discovering new growth opportunities

by taking advantage of leading-edge technologies to do

business differently. In doing so, they’re enhancing their

processes, their value propositions, and their relationships

with both internal and external customers.

Analyst firm 451 Research defines Digital Transformation

as “the result of IT innovation that is aligned with

and driven by a well-planned business strategy, with

the goal of transforming how organizations serve

customers, employees and partners; support continuous

improvement in business operations; disrupt existing

businesses and markets; and invent new businesses and

business models.”1

Most businesses are understandably optimistic about

these new possibilities. In the 451 Research report "Digital

transformation: the what, the why and the how," 40

percent of IT shops surveyed were planning or executing

on a Digital Transformation strategy. Others expressed keen

interest but had no formal plan as yet. The gap between

the vision the analyst firm lays out of improved processes,

disrupted markets etc. and the execution of an IT strategy

to achieve Digital Transformation can be daunting.1

To realize all the benefits of a digital future, the enterprise

needs a strong digital foundation — from the business

model down to operational processes and network

architecture. This eBook argues that the network is

both an overlooked piece of the Hybrid IT architecture

that drives Digital Transformation and a foundation of

that architecture. As plans take shape for the next wave

of Digital Transformations, the network’s role in tying

together the Hybrid IT plan deserves careful attention.

The expectations of what Digital Transformations can

achieve are rising fast. To drive the transformation of the

enterprise, the IT environment is experiencing a digital

revolution, and IT organizations are faced with all kinds

of new expectations surrounding data, video, voice the

increased agility in processes and organizational structure.

This is just a brief sampling of the elements that directly

address network capability. To meet the demands of a

new digital reality, the network has to be faster, more

powerful, more scalable, more reliable, and more flexible

than ever. That might seem like a lot to digest and

implement, but your transformation into a more agile

infrastructure might be closer than you think.

" ...we believe it is an inescapable truth that every business is becoming a digital business, controlled by software, which is the manifestation of these digital transformations. Businesses must react, driven by the imperatives of improving intelligence, agility and their customer-centricity. The overall — but seldom-voiced — goal is survival; just ask some of those that succumbed to the transformation of their physical business into a digital one.”

– Nick Patience, 451 Research

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eBook Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy

Hybrid IT — Your Launchpad

David Shacochis, vice president of Hybrid IT Platform

Solutions, attributes today’s growing number of Digital

Transformations to the expectations set by consumer-

oriented services that have been growing quickly in

speeds, capabilities and services offered in recent years.

Many enterprise leaders realize that in order to be able

to innovate at the same pace that their customers see

elsewhere in their lives, their in-house IT needs to evolve

into a “business agility platform.” Business innovators

need a platform upon which they can experiment and

take digital risks, paving the way toward a digital user

experience that generates enterprise value.

The goal of any company on the verge of transformation is

to focus on the user experience, where the business lives

and breathes. “The emerging business agility platform,” says

Shacochis, “is scalable, programmable, and self-service. It

requires support for a range of deployment models that can

be tuned to the nature of the user experience workload.

This is the one thing we hear from our customers — how

can we achieve the same level of user experience that we

see from major players of the cloud and mobile application

industry? How does our IT platform support a rich digital user

experience over the top?”

In the Spotlight: Which IT Services Should Be Managed?

Using a managed services provider can lighten the load for overstretched IT departments. It can lower costs by shifting capital to operational expenditures. And it can make an IT team more agile.

In its State of Managed Services: 2016 report, the Technology Services Industry Association revealed that managed services represented nearly a quarter of the revenue that members had made selling tech services, up from 6 percent the previous year.

Offloading at least some IT services will be necessary for many companies in 2017, argues CenturyLink’s Scott Brindamour. He leads CenturyLink’s architect team for advanced technology solutions, which focuses on multi-product hosting, networking and the cloud for global customers.

Because digital transformation is the norm, mastering every possible technology that could be offered to users isn’t an option for most companies, Brindamour said.

“Most clients are at the stage where they can’t be an expert in everything,” he said. “They’re trying to focus on what matters to their business and their customers.”

To fully take advantage of the available managed services options, an IT department must become adept at managing relationships, not only with external providers, but also with internal users, who are increasingly being seen as customers. To avoid the specter of shadow IT and the loss of control, the Chief information officer must reinvent the IT department as an enabling force in the company that uses a combination of its own expertise and third-party capabilities to satisfy the needs of the business.

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eBook Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy

The freedom introduced by a Hybrid IT scenario allows you to innovate around a platform that integrates with your business in smart ways.

These questions lead to one more: How do you begin such

a transition when you face so many challenges in your

existing environment? You’re faced with legacy networks,

an aging infrastructure, and expensive hardware and

software, among other potential roadblocks. At the same

time, you need to advance your analytics, cloud and IoT

strategies quickly to enhance your customer experience

and respond in real-time to business requirements.

Weighed against the incredible promise of Digital

Transformation, the challenge of how to evolve and where

to focus your resources looms large.

Increasing numbers of organizations are developing a

Hybrid IT strategy to accelerate their Digital Transformation.

A Hybrid IT infrastructure is one that leverages a mix of

two or more of the following: on-premises data center,

data center colocation, managed hosting, or virtualized

cloud infrastructure, all linked together via a robust

network topology. The freedom introduced by a Hybrid

IT scenario allows you to build a business agility platform

that transforms along with your strategy. You not only have

access to agile computing and IT infrastructure resources,

you also benefit from the immense information heritage

built up across years of IT system runtime.

With the right hybrid IT strategy and tools, Shacochis says,

“IT leaders can produce an immensely transformative

effect over time. Glib statements like ‘move everything to

the cloud’ are daunting and problematic, but connecting

everything together with a Hybrid IT lifecycle architecture

can actually lead to value creation.”

The speed, agility, and scale that come with a cloud-enabled,

Hybrid IT environment requires a connective network

infrastructure that can scale and change in step with the IT

platforms that run across it.

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eBook Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy

The Network — A Fundamental Asset

Because the network is the nervous system of your

entire organization, it is also the backbone of your Digital

Transformation strategy. The network is analogous to the

electrical wiring in the modern home. It is fundamental

to the operation of almost every other component in the

home. But just like consumers don’t want to think about

the electrical wiring in their houses on a daily basis, the

corporate network is an essential component of your

company — that should simply work, without taking up

management time and bandwidth.

Unfortunately, this idea that the network is an invisible

foundation means that the network has often been an

afterthought in the application development process.

Often, management simply wants to put a physical

infrastructure in place and move onto other matters. That

understandable desire can also blind strategists to the

business opportunities inherent in Digital Transformation,

many of which directly address the network’s capabilities.

For instance, the network is critical to the performance of

cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings such as

Salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks or Microsoft Office 365

as well as other new options such as Infrastructure-as-a-

Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The network

is the linkage for distributed enterprises with many branches

like national retailers and banks or even employees working

from home or via mobile devices. The network is also the

gateway to the vast resources of the cloud from providers

such as CenturyLink, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and

Microsoft Azure. Many enterprises use multiple clouds from

different providers. The network is the platform that connects

those clouds into a single environment and facilitates the

unified management of that environment.

These trends and more mean that the network is more

critical than ever to the success of the business as

more enterprise traffic than ever before is flowing over

networks — both public and private. The network is a

key strategic asset at the heart of Digital Transformation.

But, unlike other assets, today it does not need to tie up

capital or limit growth when capital resources get tight.

Companies are turning to what Eric Barrett, product

management director at CenturyLink, calls hybrid networks.

“What we’re starting to see is a move toward integrated

hybrid networks,” he says, “where customers are telling

us they no longer want to deal with a large dedicated

corporate network, in which they have to manage security,

compliance, maintenance, and other network-management

concerns via a series of task- specific appliances.”

The global enterprise network today is actually made up

of different network topologies across a highly distributed

environment. Integrating the networks is complicated

and many customers want to hand off the bulk of their

network concerns to a managed service provider. The

hybrid approach allows enterprises to take advantage of

the broadband explosion providing network speeds to

homes and small businesses — but at a fraction of more

traditional data center costs.

One of the big drivers of this desire to hand off network

functions is that businesses are looking for the right mix

of price and simplification. Yet, building and managing a

hybrid network might not be their core competency

or where they want to put limited resources. Hybrid

networks can bring both simplicity and cost effectiveness,

if designed and managed properly.

“In the traditional network scenario,” Barrett says, “you

could build an Internet VPN, or purchase an MPLS

network, establish your connections — but it can be a big

maintenance pain point for an enterprise. Businesses are

seeking a much easier and faster way to turn up those

VPNs and essentially bring up the Internet. They want to

be able to do it quickly over a Web portal.”

From the customer perspective, the hybrid network

approach is all about simplification, and that simplification

brings agility and lower costs.

With the growth of the cloud, the network is more critical than ever to the success of the business.

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eBook Digital Transformation Demands a Hybrid Network Strategy

Technology Innovation Underpinning 21st Century Network

Just as computing models are being redefined by the

cloud paradigm, networks too are changing through

technological innovation, some of which are drawn from

the cloud world. Technologies such as software-defined

wide area networking (SD-WAN), network function

virtualization (NFV), and network virtualization (NV) are

foundations of the 21st century enterprise network.

SD-WAN, NFV, and NV introduce new ways to design,

build, and operate networks. Twenty years’ worth of

evolution and innovation has led to all-new ways to access

our networks — in both devices and services — as well

as new ways to manage and store the types of Big Data

flowing through our systems every day. SD-WAN, NFV,

and NV are all part of the new network reality — but why?

What do they offer to the large enterprise IT buyer?

New technologies such as SD-WAN and NFV will allow

networks to become more fluid and adaptive to user

demands while increasing centralized policy control and

security. The promise inherent in these technologies

is greater reliability and flexibility, stronger automation

potential, better scalability, and increased ease of use.

Network services are quicker to deploy and are more

dependable and agile. Highly virtualized IP networks will

rely on these technologies, and the result will be lower

costs and new methods to monetize those networks.

“One of the reasons technologies like SD-WAN have become

so attractive to both enterprises and service providers,” says

Barrett, “is that you can implement a set of commoditized

network technologies and provision — through software —

the precise services, bandwidth, and Quality of Service (QoS)

you need, between different locations and on a constantly

changing basis. So there’s less human touch involved, and less

investment with respect to capital equipment. And whatever

capital gets expended has a much longer shelf life and can

endure depreciation cycles. That’s the big attraction: These

technologies are driven by their ability to keep pace with

accelerating technology and change.”

In many ways, SD-WAN, NFV, and NV represent the next

step in the digital transformation of the enterprise network.

These technologies introduce an innovative way to virtualize

whole networks, simplify configuration, and enable

automated management including establishing security

measures even in highly distributed organizations that use

multiple broadband vendors in local sites. Customers can

now interact with their networks with dynamic software

rather than on less flexible, costly dedicated network

hardware. You want these technologies in your environment;

they are some of the technological components that will

empower the future of your organization’s network. They will

help you gain a clear vision of how to move your business

forward. They will help your IT infrastructure become more

predictable, more reliable and more secure.

The best approach to deliver on the promise of this next

generation network is to find a service provider with the

breadth and depth of experience and services to help achieve

your business goals and focus your IT resources in furthering

the business, rather than developing and managing the

foundational IT platform it runs on. DIY approaches exist,

but management burdens still fall on internal IT and the

backbones do not necessarily have the capabilities built into

the DNA of a carrier-class network like CenturyLink. Hybrid

IT strategies allow you to choose the best network and best

managed service provider for your needs.

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What to Look for in an SD-WAN SolutionChoosing the right SD-WAN solution is the first step to

success. DIY solutions enable the benefits of SD-WAN,

as long as you install, configure, monitor and manage it

correctly. But, you still have ongoing operations and must

integrate and manage multiple broadband and network

access vendors.

CenturyLink opted to offer SD-WAN as a managed service.

Here’s how it works. We configure the hardware and ship

it to your site for plug and play installation, with no capital

outlay on your part. We provision, configure, optimize and

mange the service across all of your locations.

We secure it with built-in encryption, segmentation and

central security policy control via a central portal, so that

you can enforce security policies consistently across all

locations. Secure Internet access can be provided directly

from every location, including branches so that you can

secure branches more cost-effectively and easily.

You'll have centralized control and administration for the

entire WAN. New policies and application priorities can be

created and orchestrated in minutes. Application-aware

routing automatically identifies the end-to-end path with

lowest network latency and best performance between

users and applications so that you can mitigate application

performance problems and improve the end user

application experience.

We also simplify management and billing. With our

managed service, you'll benefit from our volume buying

agreements with broadband and wireless providers. And

you get one bill for access and service management.

You get all the benefits of SD-WAN and we manage it for

you. All you have to do is run your business and take care

of your own customers.

70% of enterprises plan to adopt SD-WAN by 2018.2

In the Spotlight: Software-Defined WAN

The Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is catching on. According to a recent IDC study, 70% of enterprises plan to adopt SD-WAN by 20182. Drivers of SD-WAN interest include the growth of cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and a general increase in mobility. These three factors have put new levels of pressure on existing WANs.

SD-WAN offers a solution to these drivers of change. By making WAN functionality available through a centrally managed, uniform appliance that connects through virtually any cable or broadband provider, SD-WAN can be more flexible and economical than existing WAN options. As the SD-WAN rubber hits the road and gets into broad usage, though, a question emerges: How do you really make it work for your business?

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Leveraging your Network for Voice Services

Often overlooked amid the buzz of cloud, Big Data and

other new capabilities is the need to evolve voice services

for the business. Many businesses are still using traditional

telephony PBX systems, key systems, and Centrex — even

as they evolve their networks and computing platforms to

modern technologies and models. Just like the network

itself is an invisible part of the IT infrastructure to most

users, the phone is such a standard part of everyday

business life it can be equally forgotten as part of planning

for the future. Yet, it is often a crucial link with customers.

The phone is a uniquely networked tool today in that

those traditional telephony solutions still run on their own

networks. A Hybrid IT platform actually lends itself well

to supporting voice services in the way that users want

to consume them: mobile and fully integrated with other

forms of communications and with your data resources.

Voice has become an application on the shared

infrastructure rather than a dedicated piece of hardware

and network. Hosted Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions are

essentially voice applications running on cloud computing

platforms, connecting users over a hybrid network. As

with the broader Hybrid IT strategy, hybrid voice solutions

follow a similar approach, combining on-premises (IP-

PBX), cloud (hosted VoIP), and traditional PBXs served by

SIP trunks to form a corporate-wide voice solution that

can grow and evolve as the business changes.

The number-one driver for people considering a move to

VoIP is a need to reduce IT complexity and cost. In a

survey conducted by Network World of customers who

implemented VoIP, enhanced productivity and cost savings

were cited as the top benefits of moving to VoIP.3

A hybrid IT platform actually lends itself

well to supporting voice services in the way

that users want to consume them: mobile

and fully integrated with other forms of

communications.

Customers who have implemeted VoIP cite enhanced productivity and cost savings as the top benefits of moving to VoIP.3

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©2017 CenturyLink. All Rights Reserved. The CenturyLink mark, pathways logo and certain CenturyLink product names are the property of CenturyLink. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Services not available everywhere. Business customers only. CenturyLink may change or cancel services or substitute similar services at its sole discretion without notice.771012216 -2- digital-transformation-demands-new-network-strategy-ebook-CM151185

1 451 Research. Digital Transformation: The what, the why and the how; August 2016

2 IDC Presentation: Worldwide SD-WAN Survey Special Report May 2016, Brad Casemore Rohit Mehra, May 2016

3 Network World Market Pulse. Unified Communications and Collaboration Take Center Stage. Sponsored by CenturyLink. 2016

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Your future hybrid IT environment will be dynamic and highly customizable, and it will support the simple addition of new network, cloud, hosting, and managed services.

Balance and simplicity at the core of your Hybrid IT environment

New networking technologies such as SD-WAN and NFV

are only the tip of the iceberg, and the evolution of those

kinds of technologies is accelerating so rapidly that it’s

only a matter of time before they’re the accepted norm.

Your future hybrid IT environment will be dynamic and

highly customizable, and it will support the simple addition

of new network, cloud, hosting, and managed services.

In the ideal hybrid scenario, you will be able to configure

network services with the click of a button.

Automation, virtualization, optimization, the notion of

getting more for less — from a network standpoint, there’s

been a huge acceleration of opportunities for efficiency.

Performing maintenance, applying patches, doing day-to-

day upkeep — everything will be easier in the hybrid model.

That’s the end state that people in IT have been wanting

forever: How do we make technology a growth engine and

a profit center? How do we make these systems monetize

Big Data, how do we make them drive growth, how do we

profit from these systems already in place?

Technologies such as SD-WAN and NFV will define how

providers offer automation, and configurable services,

and Just in Time (JIT) ways of dealing with the Internet of

Everything. The future will involve those players that have

proven capabilities to work in a hybrid, balanced way that lets

them address the ever-growing needs of their customers.

Hybrid IT architecture — and the hybrid network at its core

— are the foundations of Digital Transformation.