How TSBs will support global enterprises in 2024

This article was originally published by VMblog

How Technology Service Brokers Will Support Global Enterprises in 2024: Four Predictions

Technology companies are contending with rising costs, a difficult macroeconomic climate, and geopolitical turmoil that threatens the reliability and security of global networks. As these realities persist in the coming year, enterprises will increasingly turn to Technology Service Brokers (TSBs) for help in finding, buying, and managing technology and connectivity services. However, “best effort” promises from carriers will not be enough in 2024. With that said, here are my four predictions on the qualities that TSBs will increasingly evaluate when choosing a connectivity provider to support global enterprises.

1) Scalable Bandwidth

The demand for scalable, high-capacity bandwidth will only increase as multinational enterprises strive to cost-effectively serve diverse application needs, improve performance, and maintain customer satisfaction. TSBs will push to understand how connectivity services are optimized to serve those needs through the recent development of open network architecture and coherent pluggable components.

Coherent pluggable components are now essential for meeting rising bandwidth demand in data centers, cloud computing, and high-speed applications (AI and video), driving significant value for enterprise customers by enhancing power efficiency and cost savings without sacrificing capacity, performance, or scalability. In 2024, connectivity services enabled by coherent pluggables will help enterprises unlock numerous use cases, including increased access to data centers and multi-cloud sites, disaster recovery, and data replication.

2) Reliable Performance and Security on a Global Scale

Multinational enterprises are pushing more traffic and applications over the Internet than ever before, and that trend will continue in 2024. Reliable performance and security on a global scale will be more crucial for business success than ever before. However, with increased SD-WAN deployments, many enterprises will find that carriers’ underlay networks lack performance and security because they are pieced together through acquisitions. In other cases, carriers will diversify their portfolio so much that they will lack expertise in delivering high-performance connectivity. Furthermore, many providers only offer network security as an “add-on.” It will become foundational to connectivity services in 2024’s global threat landscape.

To meet 2024’s difficulties, TSBs will work to understand a carrier’s network evolution and evaluate their track record and expertise in solving the performance and security problems associated with global service delivery. To address network security specifically, TSBs will prioritize global DDoS mitigation that is native to all a potential carrier’s networking services.

3) An Excellent Service Delivery Experience

Enterprises place significant importance on the service delivery experience. Unfortunately, previous negative service delivery experiences are inhibiting innovation by preventing enterprises from exploring new connectivity providers. In 2024, TSBs will address this issue by leveraging Internet carriers with globally distributed service delivery teams that can provide a tailored experience for enterprise customers.

TSBs will seek service delivery teams that possess a deep understanding of the markets they serve and can leverage relationships in those markets. Furthermore, many carriers currently falter in the implementation stage. To address this, transparent communication throughout the service delivery process will become a key consideration for TSBs in the coming year. TSBs will seek service delivery teams that take responsibility for a solution from implementation to operation until that solution functions optimally in a customer’s IT environment.

4) Responsive and knowledgeable customer service resources

Excellent service delivery experiences must be built on a commitment to customer service. As a result, customer service will continue to be a major focus of TSBs when evaluating connectivity partners. They’ll evaluate if customer service is a core part of a carrier’s business and culture. Have third-party measurements validated its customers’ trust in their services? Does the carrier’s SLA and overall support process demonstrate their ability to be a responsive partner when there is a service-impacting problem?

In 2024, simplicity will become the defining quality of customer service resources, as the traditional gauntlet of portals and credentials will be consolidated. To provide value to enterprises, TSBs will choose connectivity services that can be accessed through either 1) a single service portal that provides full transparency of service tickets, real-time network analytics and traffic graphs, or 2) open APIs that can integrate directly into the customer’s IPSM platform.

Performance, Trust and Transparency Will Be Paramount

As we head into 2024, enterprises will continue to face challenges related to the cost and complexity of multi-site and multi-cloud adoption, combined with the risks of global service delivery and increased security threats on a global scale. To help enterprises overcome these challenges, TSBs will seek global Internet providers that demonstrate measurable network performance, have trusted and effective service delivery/support processes and transparently share all data in a way that best suits the customer’s business need. Connectivity partners will work to establish these qualities, and TSBs will provide meaningful value to their enterprise customers through these qualities, no matter what challenges 2024 presents.

Scott Nichols, CCO