What is Network Transformation?

The technology landscape is operating at a speed of innovation faster than anything we have experienced before. As a result, enterprises are finding it difficult to remain competitive and are seeking ways to stay ahead. Enhancing agility, speed, productivity, and resilience is essential. To do this, leaders must evaluate the gaps in their business to discern where they can make improvements—and networks are no exception. Network transformation is at the center of digitization initiatives – and might be the key to successfully navigating evolving business needs. In this article, I’ll explore what enterprises need to succeed in this process.

What is Network Transformation?

In simple terms, network transformation is the process of updating and improving a company’s network infrastructure to better align it with the company’s business goals. The goal of network transformation is to create a more agile, efficient, and effective network that can better support the business’s digital transformation initiatives.

Network transformation is a fundamental redesign of the entire organization’s network infrastructure, including wide area network (WAN), local area network (LAN), wireless LAN (WLAN), and internet connectivity. Network transformation can also include other infrastructure components such as voice, data center, and security.

An important point to make is that network transformation is not a lift-and-shift migration of an old network to a new one—for example, from on-premises servers to infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Rather, it is a holistic and comprehensive approach that should be tailored to each organization’s specific needs.

Why is it important?

Does every company need to initiate a network transformation? In most cases, the answer is yes. Without transforming network infrastructure, companies risk limiting their capabilities and falling behind in the fast-paced digital world. New services are emerging daily, and customers are pressing service providers (SPs) to enable new business demands. Therefore, SPs and enterprises should view network transformation as an essential process.

Here are the key reasons why network transformation is vital:

• Scalability and elasticity: According to TeleGeography, global traffic is increasing by approximately 30% each year. In addition to the growing scale, the shift of traffic is also bouncing from one service to another. For example, a significant amount of traffic bandwidth has shifted from business services to home services due to the working-from-home trend. This changing environment with the constant demand for more bandwidth requires service providers to have a more elastic network. Such elasticity enables SPs to scale their network according to real-time needs and even reallocate resources from one end of the network to another. Legacy network infrastructure is unable to meet these requirements.
• Innovation and agility: Service providers are continually pressed by their customers to adapt and evolve to accommodate emerging needs. These range from digital transformation and cloud migration to as-a-service delivery models and, most recently, AI integration. This constant evolution poses a significant challenge to traditional networking solutions. However, network transformation can enable service providers to respond quickly to new opportunities and challenges by adopting more flexible approaches, such as software-centric solutions.
• Cost reduction: Traditional networking solutions force service providers to invest heavily in scaling their infrastructure using expensive, bulky platforms. This is at a time when SPs are experiencing revenue reduction from over-the-top (OTT) services and growing operational overhead. Transforming to a more flexible, agile network can help service providers reduce capital investments, operational overhead, and even carbon emissions.
• Operations improvement: It is common to use 5-20 types of routing boxes in a large-scale network, as different network domains often require different routing solutions. This doesn’t even include firewalls, distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) scrubbers, monitoring tools, and load balancers. Managing and operating a network with so many “boxes” that have different management skills, software updates, and spare parts can be challenging. The addition of a limited and inflexible scaling mechanism further complicates matters, making it clear why service providers must seek to transform their network solutions to reduce their operational efforts.
• Security enhancement: New emerging services and distributed multi-cloud environments are creating new cyber threats that legacy network solutions cannot mitigate. Service providers must evolve their network and security infrastructure to adapt to new market requirements without jeopardizing security.

Developing a Network Transformation Strategy

A network transformation strategy should be designed to meet the new and evolving requirements driven by digital transformation. Some of the key factors to consider when designing and implementing a network transformation strategy include:

• Accessibility: Digital transformation initiatives commonly make corporate networks more distributed as remote users, cloud applications, and mobile devices connect to corporate resources from everywhere. A network designed to support the modern digital business must provide high-performance, secure access wherever users and applications are.
• Scalability: As companies deploy new technologies, their bandwidth requirements continue to grow. Networking and security solutions must be designed and implemented to easily scale to keep pace with the evolving business needs.
• Performance: Cloud applications are performance-sensitive, and inefficient networking will impact performance and user productivity. A network transformation project should ensure traffic is intelligently routed over the corporate WAN via high-performance, reliable network connectivity.
• Security: As users and applications move off-premise, they dissolve the network perimeter where, traditionally, companies have focused their security protection. Network transformation projects should include decentralized network security to ensure inspection and policy enforcement occur closest to the user or application.

Conclusion

Network transformation is a journey, not a destination. And like any journey, there are many different paths you can take. But, the best way to navigate your network transformation journey is to focus on best practices – and realize that the process of transformation is continual.