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