OPTIMIZING NETWORK TCO AS A STRATEGIC IMPERATIVE

November 2023 | TAGS: TCO OPTIMIZATION, NETWORK AS A SERVICE

Every senior executive seeks to deliver better business outcomes while spending less money. In the world of Senior IT executives, optimizing network services TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is essential as the infrastructure budget is allocated begrudgingly. Why? Well, for the most part, the domain of network services is often regarded as a large investment on a “black box” that’s noticed only when the system fails. (AKA a high-cost item seemingly prone to hiccups.)

An upside emerges as the network delivers on strategy.

But a corner is being turned. Increasingly, investment in the network is linked to competitive advantage. The eager embrace of digital transformation reveals an undeniable linkage between network services and unfaltering digital experience driving business outcomes and growth. As enterprises extend the network, optimizing system-wide TCO becomes a strategic imperative freeing up funds to invest in more digital initiatives that can deliver further business and financial outcomes. It’s a virtuous cycle: Push TCO savings back into the network with the result of heightened competitive advantage.

Put simply, optimized TCO of network services is now directly tied to the efficiency and performance of the enterprise network and the business. Whew! That only took what, two, three decades?

A radical change in network TCO optimization best practice.

First, acknowledge that it’s a journey – optimization will always mean getting better over time – but now that time scale has shifted dramatically. Best practice historically required ongoing and detailed analysis to identify levers and doing the real work of changing them over the years. Today is a totally different world: we can now deploy tools, technologies, and frameworks to optimize cost more efficiently with greater ongoing effect on business outcomes.

Optimization options abound.

The CIO or a direct report is calling the shots here, exploring well-understood avenues for immediate improvements – such as investing in technologies that more efficiently enable the enterprise mission. This could mean implementing software-defined Networking solutions, focusing on automation, or adopting Network as a Service (NaaS) – all good ways to further optimize network management costs while ensuring robust performance, resiliency, and scalability. The main point to keep in mind is aligning any changes with your organization's strategic initiatives.

Your team doesn’t wear capes, but they are starting to look heroic. Don’t squander this goodwill by trying to boil the ocean. Focus is your friend: define and prioritize specific programs and assign reasonable KPIs that can get more aggressive with time.

Value creation. Value creation. Value creation.

In a business of any size, changes to existing systems can cause rancor. Open dialogue and integration across siloed systems, processes, and teams are key to surfacing and addressing resistance to change and competing incentives. And still, change is hard. Especially if you’re asking the organization to spend so it can save.

Modeling ongoing stakeholder engagement, sharing success stories across the enterprise, and embracing innovation iteration, all demonstrate to your team how best to assure positive outcomes as you align spend optimization to business value.

And then, it all starts to pay off. Literally

As your optimization plan takes shape, you’ll find it provides an opportunity to increase collaborative ideation about how a sound network optimization strategy will absolutely bolster the strategic goals of the entire enterprise. (See aforementioned “undeniable linkage”.)

And once your colleagues experience the upside of investments that enhance user experience, streamline workflows, or deliver a jump in NPS score due to consistent application performance and customer delight — they’ll know who to thank.

You’ve made the right investments, cut in ways that no one noticed, and trained your team to be as agile as your network.

Look at you breezing through your next budget allocation cycle.

A lesson learned: TCO optimization and legacy lessons

As part of TCO optimization initiatives, enterprises are investing in modernizing their applications, data, and the underlying infrastructure to ensure they are as competitive as possible. Many of Microland’s clients have decades of valuable business intelligence accessed via legacy applications housed in legacy infrastructure. For these clients, modernizing their legacy infrastructure to Software Defined Infrastructure and increasingly fluid and automated access to this data trove is the cornerstone to an optimization strategy that drives competitive advantage (and closes security and compliance gaps that might exist.)

We’ve taken on hundreds of such assignments and have learned a few valuable lessons along the way.

1. Be alert to the technical debt of accumulated hacks and workarounds. Legacy network infrastructure demands a larger pool of tools – some highly specialized for specific technologies and OEMS. CLI-based support of legacy infra requires more resources to simply keep the network operational through monitoring and management. This also impacts incident response and remediation time which adversely affects business operations and customer experience.

2. Modernizing legacy network infra is no simple task, but the upside is impressive. Modernizing existing legacy to software-defined networking (SDN) can present compatibility issues, service, and operations disruptions, and even security concerns. However, taking a platform-based approach can help overcome the challenges of SDN adoption by creating a more adaptive, secure, and efficient networking environment. This method of integrating the monitoring and management of varied technologies and OEM solutions can break down silos and provide orders of magnitude improvement in performance, availability, and reliability.

3. Every legacy modernization tends to be unique. Transitioning from legacy typically demands a one-of-a-kind mix of technologies and best-of-breed OEM solutions blended to address the specific needs of the enterprise. Vender-neutrality becomes an operating principle to ensure network performance and cost efficiency.

Transforming legacy applications and underlying infra to a modernized IT platform is one heck of an optimization play and therefore highly rewarding. However, due to the complexity and criticality of business operations, it’s also one of the most challenging aspects of system modernization. We’ve learned to approach legacy optimization with the expertise and respect it deserves.

What’s inspiring us right now.

Bob Wysocki, our Senior Vice President, Networking & Cyber, is a 30+ year veteran of the networking business and has never experienced a more exciting time of robust innovation — which he finds immensely inspiring. Bob believes networking is in the early days of a revolution — on the path to becoming a utility like cloud. The industry is beginning to refer to this phenomenon as Network as a Service (NaaS) and at ONUG, the Networking industry event held this past October in New York City, it was the inescapable topic of conversation.

A lot of the buzz about NaaS was spurred by the challenge presented to networking technologists as users demand a flawless experience when accessing their applications anywhere from any device — regardless of how fragmented the network — while enterprises chase excellence in business outcomes at scale. These heightened expectations of network performance are either forcing new levels of complexity onto existing network architecture and operations or interpreted as a siren call for radical innovation of a new model.

Enter NaaS — a Mars-landing-worthy leap from network management that is far too often manual to a solution that at its best is hyper-automated, highly predictable, and dynamic. Motivated by the innovation that abounds in this space right now, Bob and his team are racing to perfect Microland’s unique version of NaaS that delivers to clients an immediate improvement in the efficiency and performance of the enterprise network.

Bob knows it is still early in the NaaS revolution. That said, all the outside of the (black) box thinking he and his peers are obsessed with right now assures him the days of checking SLA boxes are fading fast as the C-Suite looks to the network to significantly contribute to their enterprise’s competitive stance.

It’s a fine time indeed to be contemplating the future of the network.

You heard it here, first.

For a fourth consecutive year, Microland has been positioned as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Managed Network Services (MNS).

Here are some of our favorite quotes from the 2023 Managed Network Services report:

1. Network automation and orchestration: Microland’s network automation and orchestration capabilities are consistently within the top quartile of performance, compared to other vendors in this research.

2. Business impact support: Microland includes advanced analytics capabilities with business experience and decision-making insights by providing performance visibility and decision-outcome guidance.

3. Security: Microland has a very comprehensive security portfolio with strong offerings highlighted by their threat detection and response improvements over the last 12 months.

We couldn’t be prouder of our technologists and all Microlanders focused on delivering unfaltering user experience through our solutions. And of course, it’s great to see that our deep investments in the platform-led innovations that define the Microland Intelligent Network Experience Framework are paying off in increased customer satisfaction and growth that is noticed and applauded by Gartner®.