What are the common network infrastructure challenges?
Firstly, a network infrastructure that's flexible, scalable, and future-ready has become the lynchpin for ensuring seamless communication, supporting business growth, and facilitating innovation across an enterprise. It’s that simple. As you transform your business, your network needs to adapt with you to accommodate new technology and capabilities.
Equally, you need to know how to adapt your network infrastructure to ensure every office, location, employee and customer has a unified user experience of your sites. As well as your services and applications. No matter what digital transformation initiative you implement. Whether your focus is on moving to the (public or hybrid) cloud, implementing SaaS or AI applications, your network infrastructure should be flexible to accommodate them and maintain a strong end-user experience.
That means satisfied, productive employees who can communicate, collaborate, and access all the digital tools they need. As well as customers who have a stellar experience with your brand and services every time. You need to minimize downtime, improve network security, ensure the right hardware and software to meet increased demands, and ensure the right levels of network security. It's not easy!
But the benefits of an adaptable network infrastructure boil down to:
- Higher outputs.
- Higher revenue.
- Increased brand reputation.
- Increased market share.
- More growth.
However, the challenges of adapting your network infrastructure to accommodate your transformation efforts should be addressed head on too. This blog will address the main challenges many enterprises encounter when scaling, modifying or adapting their networks. Keep reading for a roadmap to address these challenges with further content from Expereo.
How can your network infrastructure hold your transformation back?
From ensuring resilience and reliability to supporting large-scale data or AI projects, enterprises grapple with a multitude of complexities when ensuring their networks are fit-for-purpose. A network is extremely difficult to build, let alone build one with an eye on the future. Especially with the rate of technology accelerating at an unprecedented speed!
In our experience, enterprises can encounter a range of network infrastructure challenges, including:
- Cloud connectivity or networking: Integrating cloud computing and ensuring seamless connectivity between on-premises and cloud environments pose challenges.
- Application performance: Bandwidth and latency issues can affect the performance of critical applications and impact user experience.
- Network visibility: Limited visibility into network performance and traffic patterns can make troubleshooting and optimization hard and make it difficult to know where to allocate resource.
- Cybersecurity threats: Networks must be resilient against evolving cybersecurity threats, including malware, ransomware, and DDoS attacks.
- Resilience and reliability: Maintaining high levels of uptime and ensuring resilience against network failures or outages is paramount for enterprise connectivity.
- Large-scale data or AI projects: Supporting the bandwidth and performance requirements of Big Data and AI projects demands a robust and scalable network infrastructure.
- Managing local connectivity providers: As you grow and expand into new regions, you’ll have to coordinate with local connectivity providers which requires time, skills, and local knowledge
- Availability of in-house skills: Enterprises may face challenges in recruiting and retaining skilled personnel with expertise in network scalability and management.
- Legacy infrastructure limitations: Enterprises using infrastructure like MPLS may experience limited scalability, performance, and agility, ultimately impeding innovation and competitiveness.
With connectivity serving as the backbone of digital transformation, adopting an adaptable network infrastructure is non-negotiable to remain competitive. But it can be difficult to know where to start. Or where your plans fall in comparison with other technology leaders’, or what trends are shaping other tech leaders’ decision making.
Available now: Enterprise Horizons 2024
We’ve only just scratched the surface of the range of network infrastructure challenges an enterprise can encounter when transforming their business. To explore this topic further and get data-backed insights on the choices made by 650 technology leaders about their networks, download the latest publication, IDC InfoBrief, Enterprise Horizons 2024: Technology Leaders’ Priorities on their Digital Business Journey, based on the IDC Technology Leaders Survey, commissioned by Expereo.
Alternatively, to create a scalable network infrastructure that you have full visibility and control over, get in touch with Expereo.
We craft connectivity solutions and network services for global enterprises who need to harness faster, more reliable and secure connectivity. All with in-built scalability across diverse locations, offices and teams.