Meeting Evolving Network Needs with a Managed IT Services Provider
July 22, 2019In the age of digital transformation, colocation data center providers are taking on the role of managed IT services providers as businesses struggle to keep pace with evolving network needs. Most of these networking dependencies and complexities are being driven by mobility and BYOD culture, IoT, Hybrid and Multi-cloud infrastructures, and application access needs.
Businesses now have a fundamental need for data analytics that requires cloud, AI, and colocation integration. In addition, heavy demand for bandwidth-consuming services such as UC, content delivery, video, and more are all leading to unprecedented levels of interconnections.
What all these technology approaches have in common is that they all require advanced connectivity and differentiated networking. That means a reliance on streamlined processes of moving, collecting, and analyzing data for real-time decision making and access across a global enterprise network. To meet this wide range of requirements, corporate networks need a variety of technologies that will include MPLS, IPVPNs, SD-WANs, SDN and network function virtualization (NFV).
These data routing and network configuration approaches have emerged as solutions for creating agile and scalable networks. The problem is that they bring their own complexity challenges of implementation, management and monitoring across a global network. The colocation data center sits at the nexus of this need to develop connectivity strategies that support broader digital business agendas through managed network services.
We can see the need for managed network services providers in a recent Sirkin Research/ LiveAction survey showing 43 percent of network professionals are struggling to keep up with strategic business initiatives. The problem is that their time is being consumed by implementation, management and monitoring needs across the entire network. This is a direct result of the complexity of today’s multi-fabric, multi-vendor and multi-cloud network environments.
It’s become difficult for even the largest IT teams to keep track of appliance virtualization for network functions, MPLS needs and IPVPN solutions across a multicloud and hybrid cloud approach. It quickly grows to a state where the solutions become so complex that they are unmanageable in terms of needed manpower and technical expertise.
A global colocation data center/ Managed IT services approach becomes the only way to plan, implement, and monitor these global networks in a unified way. Both global enterprises and SMBs operating on the global stage are benefiting from managed network services such as IaaS and NaaS, provisioning, global VPN access, network virtualization and monitoring support, and a host of other services.
Managed network services providers are bringing together a host of services via their connection to major cloud providers and third-party vendor, unified global connectivity and large-scale branch connectivity. Among these added services are unified network and policy management and optimized routing and security that ensures application access. They are collectively made more effective via dedicated systems monitoring rooms and teams of managed network services technical teams at the point of need in data centers around the globe.
Leading data center services providers have evolved to go far beyond meeting the needs for scalable capacity and infrastructure, cloud migration, security, and compliance. They now are filling a vital need for global enterprises and SMBs by providing the planning, implementation and monitoring support for unified management through vital managed network services. These are all foundational to digital transformation that will fuel current and future business needs.