The corporate WAN – it’s time to transform

At Telia Carrier, we love to listen to what enterprises are thinking about and get a feel for how network technology is delivering on their business goals. It’s something our people do every day across the organization, but sometimes we like to do it in a bit more structured way.

So, we spoke to hundreds of enterprises in the US, UK, Germany and France about their enterprise networks and have just released our new report “Enterprise network insights 2020: transforming the corporate WAN”.

The report gives some fascinating insights into Corporate WANs and provides useful guidance – particularly if you are giving serious consideration to how you currently run your WAN and want to know what your peers are thinking.

It might be no surprise to hear that today, 90% of enterprises rely on the public Internet for some or all of their WAN services, and it is a testament to the redundancy built into the Internet that they do this, considering 48% say a corporate WAN outage of over 24 hours, would be catastrophic for their business.

The report has found that corporate WANs are not delivering on their promises in a number of key areas, with security in particular the biggest pain point (55%), alongside service flexibility (43%) and supplier performance (36%). Incredibly, only half feel that their current network suppliers deliver a great customer experience.

When it comes to choosing suppliers, perhaps one of the most interesting things in the report was not the importance that is placed on bandwidth capacity when choosing an Internet Service Provider (40% said this was most important), but that sustainability is very important to those making decisions about corporate WANs and 90% would pay more to secure a sustainable supplier. Sustainability and its relationship with an enterprises’ wider corporate goals in this area seem closer than ever before.

The report analyzes the main findings of the survey in three sections:

• Today’s WAN—the current state of the corporate WAN; the preferred method of connecting to the cloud; problems and ‘pain points’
• Today’s enterprise—the aims and expectations of leaders as technology evolves; the myths and misconceptions that can derail a network development strategy
• Tomorrow’s supplier—network service delivery for enterprises in the future; meeting the need for scalability, flexibility, automation, energy-efficiency and a great customer experience.

It is clear to us that enterprises understand the important role their network suppliers can play in helping to build their businesses. However, being fast and reliable is not enough, enterprises want providers that combine flexibility, innovation, and a high degree of customer focus. It’s rightly leading to serious conversations about the strategies they need to adopt for their network partnerships during the next three to five years.

Download the report and learn what your peers are thinking about the way corporate WANs are evolving.

Mattias Fridström, Chief Evangelist