Corporate WANs are underperforming, says Telia Carrier
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Corporate WANs are underperforming, says Telia Carrier

Mattias Fridström NEW.jpg

New findings from a Telia Carrier survey found that corporate WANs are failing to deliver on businesses’ priorities.

Specifically, 55% of respondents said that security is its biggest pain point, 43% said service flexibility, 36% said supplier performance and 35% said network congestion.

The report, entitled Enterprise network insights 2020: transforming the corporate WAN was conducted in the US, the UK, Germany and France with 414 respondents from a range of businesses.

Further findings from the report show that 90% of respondents rely on the public Internet for some or all of their wide area network services, 48% of them say the impact of a corporate WAN outage lasting longer than 24 hours, would be disastrous.

Only half of survey respondents - US: 57%; FR: 56%; UK: 49%; DE: 37% - rate their understanding of how the Internet backbone works as very good or excellent, while two-thirds think of public Internet connectivity as a commodity that doesn’t vary much between suppliers, specifically FR: 74%; DE: 62%; US: 62%; UK: 49%.

“Network-development strategies, unfortunately, appear to be missing the backbone piece of the puzzle,” said Mattias Fridström (pictured), chief evangelist at Telia Carrier.

“This means that Tier 1 suppliers, such as telcos and carriers, are often overlooked when it comes to choosing a method to build their WANs and connect to the cloud.”

In addition, bandwidth (40%), service flexibility (36%) and customer support (29%) are enterprises’ top three priorities when deciding on a local network partner or internet service provider to connect to their preferred cloud-service providers.

As far as sustainability more than a third of all respondents (38%) confirmed that they now only shortlist suppliers with a strong commitment to sustainability – in France, this is 55%.

Of those businesses that don’t include sustainability in their initial selection criteria, 42% say it helps them choose between the final candidates - US: 46%; UK & DE: 45%; FR: 28%.

Interestingly, only a fifth say they choose suppliers solely on the basis of price and performance. Importantly, the vast majority (95%) are willing to pay a premium for a sustainable supplier of 5% or more. 49% of respondents in Germany, 48% in the UK, 42% in the US and 37% in France confirmed their commitment to paying between 10% and 15% more.

Additionally, 90% would like their network partners to adopt more machine-to-machine workflows and automation to enhance their services, and 68% say they already use APIs to achieve real-time visibility of their network performance or control of their network infrastructure.

“If organisations really want to create the networks that transform their businesses, whilst controlling costs and reducing their carbon footprint,” added Mattias Fridström, “their leaders may need to review their strategies for the next three to five years. Network providers can be strategic partners in the growth and development of enterprises—if they’re aligned with enterprises’ needs.”

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