6 Ways to Maximize Your Network ROI in 2018

The role of IT is becoming more critical in business operations around the globe, and the spending shows it. Spicework’s State of IT Report says 87% of companies will either increase their IT budget in the coming year or see it remain steady. Nevertheless, all organizations are constantly on the lookout for how things can be done faster, cheaper, and with less capital expenses.

If your business is beginning to expand across oceans and continents, and looking to get more “bang for the buck” when it comes to global collaboration and connectivity, here are six ways to maximize the benefits of your network deployment and help you scale in an efficient way:

1. RE-EXAMINE NETWORK COSTS

For decades global organizations have relied on complicated legacy network architectures such as MPLS and add-on WAN optimization equipment to support branch office connectivity. While this configuration provides more stable connections compared to the public Internet, deployment of this architecture is both labor and cost intensive. Organizations also end up spending a significant part of their budget on WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs) that need to be phased out and repurchased every refresh cycle.

Meanwhile, they need to maintain a steady pool of network engineers to maintain those devices and put out fires when necessary. Deployment times for these networks are also incredibly high. On average, a legacy network of this nature can take between 90-120 days to set up, introducing critical delays in go-to-market strategies.

2. Reduce the Hassle of Managing a Multi-Vendor Environment

Dealing with multiple vendors can often be problematic for IT organizations. Businesses end up investing a significant amount of time into integrating solutions and ensuring they run smoothly, and managing vendor relations, tracking contracts and renewals, and processing paperwork almost becomes a second job.

Most network managers find that a substantial chunk of their time goes into managing contracts and renegotiation prices or Service Level Agreements ( SLAs). Trying to get multiple suppliers to live up to SLAs can lead to peering issues and confusion among the teams, paving the way for the blame game when something goes wrong.

CIOs and IT managers need a truly integrated global connectivity solution from a partner who has multiple capabilities or can offer bundled services.

3. Keep in Sync with Overall Company Strategy: Plan Ahead of Time

Does the business growth strategy call for expanding operations to new geographies or acquiring/merging with companies in other countries? Is cloud migration on the horizon? Identifying the key network initiatives for your business ahead of time can help structure the back office roadmap.

If your business is planning to acquire a company halfway around the world and expects the office to be up and running as quickly as possible, it could be wise to investigate modern network alternatives rather than waiting for months to deploy MPLS.

With increasing pressure to complete projects in record time, sometimes the quick fix is to rely on point-to-point or VPN solutions (depending on the location of the site) in order to get the job done fast.  But that short term mentality of “just get it done” ignores the fact that these isolated solutions pile up, leaving IT to manage a complex network with multiple points of failure, thus increasing business risk. If you take a proactive interest in the long term business goal, you can strategically review alternatives that can deliver faster deployment times and improve agility and scalability while also offering many built-in features that the conventional solutions lack.

4. Hand it Over to the Experts

According to a research from Vanson Bourne, IT teams end up spending a minimum of one third of their time fighting fires rather than carrying out proactive, strategic work that would benefit the organization.

The research found 85% of CIOs were partly or fully outsourcing IT services in an effort to simplify management needs. Some of the most commonly outsourced are:

• Application management (41%)
• Infrastructure management (40%)
• Network management (40%).

As IT complexity increases, the demand and pressures on teams will only increase, leaving little or no time for innovation. In this highly demanding environment, finding a partner or service provider that can take the hassle out of managing multiple vendors and keeping the lights on, so IT can focus on more strategic initiatives.

5. Monitor and Measure

The old management adage dictates you can’t manage what you can’t measure. The time an organization saves when networks perform better, and applications respond faster, has a monetary value. But networks are dynamic entities that transform and grow continuously.

An intelligent and intuitive monitoring tool can help administrators gain a detailed and granular view of network health and analyze and predict problems that can be addressed in advance.

6. Automate to Minimize Human Intervention for Managing Your Networks

The more human intervention your network management requires, the more rigid, time-consuming and expensive your network will be. Conventional technologies require a dedicated team of managers to configure the network, identify and trouble-shoot issues, route traffic, and assign bandwidth.  There are solutions available today that can assist your team with shaping traffic from a centralized control center, that:

• Reduce the need to touch individual switches
• Deliver services wherever needed on-demand
• Remotely set up acceleration functions
• Configure appropriate settings without sales engineers or system integrators

A solution of this caliber can leave your IT team with the time to innovate and invest in more strategic business pursuits.

Making the Right Moves

Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN has designed solutions that address the end-to-end needs of your network landscape. From a global private enterprise-grade network with built-in WAN optimization capabilities, to cloud acceleration and SD-WAN functionalities, Aryaka’s customers benefit from deployment advantages that only come from a global and comprehensive service provider.

Aryaka’s solutions have helped more than 800 global enterprises deploy connectivity in hours, compared to the weeks or months it takes with legacy networks. IT teams can save valuable time and resources by leveraging the 24/7 CCIE-level support engineers who manage and monitor networks around the world.

The need to invest in a separate monitoring tool also becomes redundant as the MyAryaka™ visibility portal provides an in-depth, real-time, end-to-end network and application visibility for your business in a simple and easy-to-use web-based platform.

Today’s business calls for a new approach to network solutions that bring with them the reliability and stability that has become quintessential for most businesses today. CIOs and IT leaders who won’t compromise on quality and yet need to be mindful of IT budgets will find value in the six strategies outlined here.

To learn more about how Aryaka’s solutions can help you, download our latest report, “The CIOs Guide to SD-WAN.”