Consistent, uninterrupted connectivity is essential for achieving digital goals and gaining a competitive advantage in today’s tech-driven world. Dan Blackwell, Pulsant’s Product Manager for Connectivity, explores how businesses can adapt to evolving connectivity demands and shares his insights on future transformations in this space.
With the increasing importance of data uptime and network resilience, how can organisations prepare to meet these demands?
Planning and working with the right partners is key. Historically, we’ve seen that connectivity is generally ordered or bought based on a requirement and you generally end up with a network that grows in complexity. It becomes difficult to manage and it also grows in cost due it not being planned with a timeline in mind.
Working with providers who can help build in that resiliency and redundancy required by those applications and services is also key, helping to remove some of the pain points and difficulties around enabling those services and making sure they’re always available and online. At Pulsant, we aim to support our clients through the infrastructure we’ve built, by removing some of the pain points which occur. We want to enable them to plan around that resiliency, that diversity, to bring them always available applications and services.
What strategies should companies adopt to ensure they can scale their IT resources efficiently while maintaining control and transparency over costs?
It’s working with organsations like us – we’ve built this national infrastructure which is fully resilient, fully diverse, which helps organisations that connect into it have the ability to connect to other services, other locations, through the same resilient network. They plug into our cloud and they can pop out of it at any other location, any of our other data centres, into the public cloud, internationally, into peering points. It enables organisations to not have to worry about building that platform for themselves and to grow with us. If they’re in one location and they want to pop into another location, or they want to reach somebody else somewhere else, they can do it across our resilient network. It’s fully diverse in and out of all our data centres and across the country.
We’re also connected into other fabrics. You join this fabric together and you can connect them altogether. You then get the value that organisations such as Pulsant are putting into building these networks and building that resilience for all our clients that are connected to the network. It removes that complexity I mentioned, because organisations can plug into us and focus on their business objectives rather than managing multiple carrier networks separately.
At the same time, I call our network a cloud. We’re not hiding our costs and just charging on usage which is what some of the other cloud platforms do. We have fixed costs so the client can flex those costs up or down, but they always understand exactly what both their network and their bandwidth is costing them, while remaining in control of what they’re utilising. We’re building out the platform and building in services to enable the client to understand what’s being used, what’s being paid for and how much it all costs.
Tell us about what you see happening in the connectivity space now to support the client journey more effectively?
More bandwidth, lower latency is what we see changing. We’ve talked about things like Edge and now we have AI which is kind of another definition for what Edge applications would be. We see this connectivity bandwidth increasing astronomically over the next few years. We see the need to data transfer across networks to increase, making the reliance on networks even more important.
If you look at any industry news or similar, resiliency, availability of the network is generally only a few percent lower in terms of importance than cybersecurity protections now. It’s becoming extremely important to businesses to make sure their applications are readily available. Not only do they want to stop being attacked, they also want to stop being prevented by the network being faulty or down. Availability is therefore really important to businesses and we’re going to see that bandwidth increase and latency requirements decrease as people want to access regions and locations where they can deliver those applications and services.
Interconnectivity will also become big because no business works in silos and everyone’s connecting to everyone. You have an ecosystem of businesses all connecting to each other which requires those partnerships, those networks, to be able to link together. Being able to have that connectivity is no longer just a case of plugging into the Internet, because everyone knows the Internet is unreliable. Having private, fixed networks which have the ability to connect between locations, with privacy, security, availability, resilience and cost control is what the industry is looking for around connectivity.
