Manage your bandwidth in minutes, not months

It’s no secret that businesses have had to adapt to some big changes in the past few years. With so much uncertainty, how on earth are CIOs and their teams supposed to plan for the future?

The answer lies in a flexible, on-demand infrastructure.

But what does this look like? What are the use cases that will drive the need for agility and what do you need to look for when it comes to building your network? And finally, what advantages are leading decision-makers discovering thanks to flexible network solutions?

An on- demand network – what is it and why do you need it?

An on-demand network means you’re in charge of your connection experience. It allows you to scale your bandwidth, raising it when necessary and lowering it when you don’t – there are some examples later on in this feature that can help you visualise this feature in action. It saves you time and money so you can focus on productivity, meaning you only ever have to pay for your minimum service at quieter times.

You’re able to quickly get quotes, order services and get them live. Secondly, for in-life changes – being able to respond to a change in circumstances, seasonal events or a workforce all choosing to come into the office for a major event. Whatever that change looks like, every part of the infrastructure needs to be able to quickly scale up or down to match what’s required.

In our recently published 2022 cloud research report, 24% of senior IT decision-makers said they wished they’d integrated flexible connectivity into their cloud-based projects the first time around: a feature that came top of the wish list of regrets.

Successful projects can often be followed by more requests that fixed connectivity may not be able to handle. Having flexible connectivity that can scale up with demand during projects and scale down when assessing, testing or optimising cloud projects can mitigate this problem.

The cloud, and cloud-based services, are designed with agility and a ‘consumption-based’ model from the outset. People are used to paying for what they need and being able to reduce it when required. The challenge comes with the network side – many companies are still stuck in the old way of doing things: manual quotes, time consuming forms and manual processes – all delivered with long-term static contracts that force companies to guess what they might need in the future. Or worse, pay for more than they need.

Digital infrastructure and the need for agility

What is digital infrastructure?

This agile platform forms part of the digital infrastructure conversation. Essentially digital infrastructure is the foundation of any connected business – this includes the network, compute and storage and then the applications and cloud platforms that keep the business running and its people connected. Without this foundation, businesses can’t operate, serve customers or innovate.

Previously this might have almost been seen as a utility layer – an essential part of the business but treated functionally. Now though, companies who invest in digital infrastructure are using it as a competitive differentiator, one that helps them innovate faster, provide a better service and respond quickly to change.

A report from the UK Government in 2016 stated that, “Over the next few decades our digital networks will be the enabling infrastructure that drives economic growth and productivity.” Since then, much has changed.

According to IDC, “Successful future enterprises will depend heavily on digital infrastructure architectures and management strategies optimized for a new generation of highly distributed workers and data-intensive applications and services. The future of digital infrastructure demands environments that are “distributed by design” with the expectation that they will be highly automated, agile, and workload aware. IT and line-of- business leaders will need to proactively collaborate and align investments with digital business priorities and KPIs.”

Mary Johnston Turner Research vice president, Future of Digital Infrastructure Agenda program at IDC

Use cases

Be in command with on-demand

A busy retailer during a festive season. A fledgling start-up which hosts global meetings once a week. A connectivity provider that supports a hybrid working model. All of these are examples of when a proactive digital infrastructure can benefit businesses

Creativity from the cloud

An award-winning creative agency initially based in Europe now has presence in North America, Asia and Africa, with plans to expand even further afield. After opening their second location, they noticed that their static, dated network arrangement was holding them back. Designers and marketeers need to react quickly to trends as soon as possible, so having a scalable network set-up is vital in making sure their work is relevant and reaches their audience at the right moment. This is where on-demand, cloud-based computing comes in. Their business has grown and nearly all their work is online compared to five years ago, so their bandwidth needs increase every year. Rather than having to sign short-term contracts or renegotiate, flexible connectivity has meant they can just upgrade bandwidth as soon as it’s needed.

A tech start-up migrates to the cloud

A start-up app developer partners language and computer science students with translators across the globe to develop an omnilingual translation app. The enterprise relied on an on-site server to store the company’s data for each of its locations. The problem was that if an issue occurred while the IT engineer was off duty, the error wouldn’t be resolved until the next time they were on site – resulting in productivity downtime.

By migrating the company’s suite of collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams to the cloud, the team can access documents and materials from anywhere in the world, at any time, but this migration was going to take weeks if it used the company’s existing bandwidth. With on- demand connectivity they were able to quickly scale up, migrate everything to the cloud, and then drop it back down to a level more suited to business as usual.

Keeping staff connected in a global enterprise

Here at Colt, we noticed a dramatic difference in bandwidth consumption in our offices throughout the week. We looked at how network traffic in our London office compared before the pandemic in 2020 to how it was being used today, revealing some intriguing results.

Pre-pandemic, we saw around 720 clients (devices which connect to the Wi-Fi network) in the office each day. Post- pandemic, this number dropped all the way down to 110 – a reduction in size almost seven times’ smaller than what we had previously experienced. But this is where it gets interesting: in 2020, bandwidth consumption was roughly 120Mbps a day, but nowadays this number has risen to 152Mbps – an increase of 26%. There are fewer people (and their devices) in the office, but they are consuming far more bandwidth.

By reshaping our digital infrastructure to reflect these changes, our IT engineers migrated these tools to the cloud, providing our staff remote access while our bandwidth allocation can deal with the spikes in traffic we see throughout the week.

A scalable network allows you to adjust your bandwidth when you need it and scale it back down when you don’t, reducing overheads and streamlining your digital infrastructure to its maximum potential. l infrastructure to its maximum potential.

Rapid data centre connectivity

  • For this telco, customer demand is growing outside of their key markets. They are getting more requests for connections into local cloud POPs, but customers don’t want to have to wait days for quotes and weeks or months for the connection to go live.
  • Thanks to on-demand connectivity, and close API alignment with their telco partners, quotes are available instantly and services into data centres can be provisioned and delivered in just minutes.

Don’t settle for less. Why wait?

The challenge now is that companies across the digital infrastructure ecosystem have changed the game when it comes to responsiveness and digital dexterity. The old approach of setting out your needs and signing a fixed contract for the next three to five years just doesn’t work in today’s world

So, what needs to change?

You and your teams need to make sure you don’t settle for less. If your business changes then your partners need to help you respond quickly and efficiently – whether that’s rapidly bringing a new location online, scaling up capacity to bring your teams together or rolling out new services around the world. Plenty of people talk about the ‘cloud-like’ experience but this needs to apply across your experience with them; it’s no use having that for your first interaction and then everything goes back to a world of manual processes and time consuming tasks.

“We’re removing as much of the old, time-consuming approach as possible, reducing the risk of errors and speeding things up for our customers. Once quotes have been received, orders can be placed in just a few clicks – either via Colt Online or through the customers’ own platform. Once the initial integration and commercials have been agreed, it means that there’s no filling out forms and chasing up account teams to get orders in process. If you’re still waiting to hear back on quotes, or stuck in the old way of ordering, maybe it’s time for a change?”.

Why wait for quoting and ordering?

For those who spend a lot on connectivity, the ability to quickly and easily get quotes is critical. Sure, for a complicated project it’s worth sitting down with the account teams and discussing the best solution, but when you need a price for a new link to a building or data centre, getting that quickly, and trusting the information is up to date, can make all the difference. Thanks to close API integration, we work with our partners to give them instant access to pricing across our network. This can be through the Colt Online platform or integrated into their own – providing instant and accurate quotes in the most efficient way possible

Why wait for infrastructure to work on your terms?

As Mark Twain said, “it is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future.” The last few years have really brought home the importance of having a modern network and being able to respond to change.

Your infrastructure needs to work on your terms, that means changing when your needs change and not forcing you to fit a static approach that doesn’t work. With Colt On Demand you can scale bandwidth up and down in just a few clicks – whether that’s an extra 5GB you need next Wednesday for an all hands or dropping down to just 100MB on Fridays when only a few people are in the office.

You should take this approach across your interactions with digital infrastructure partners:

  • If you need a billing update, the latest on planned works or to make a change on your account, how quick and easy is it?
  • Can you access information on a platform that suits you?
  • Are you stuck making a request to your account manager every time?

With online portals and apps, your experience should be the one that you want, not something dictated to you.

Colt On Demand

Colt On Demand provides digital infrastructure on your terms.

Imagine cutting-edge digital infrastructure that does exactly what you need, when you need it. Delivering access in minutes to a global fibre network, cloud providers and leading- edge applications.

You choose how you connect, wherever and however you want, through an award-winning portal, innovative APIs or as an extension of your own network. It’s end-to-end connectivity where you’re in control.

To show you how easy On Demand is to use, we’ve created a demo version of the portal that guides you through the process, step by step – being in command of your network has never been so easy.

Check out the On Demand Demo Portal

For more information, get in touch with us at www.colt.net/contact-us