It’s become an integral part of the average South African’s daily routine – constantly checking the EskomSePush app for the latest loadshedding schedule. We rarely stop to think of the IT infrastructure that’s needed for us to quickly access the most recent update and continue with the rest of our day.

And so, the irony is that while businesses are looking to cut back on IT spend to cope with the economic impact of power cuts – loadshedding is yet another reason why organisations simply can’t afford to delay their digital transformation and forego the associated efficiencies.

Over the past few years, loadshedding has become the single-biggest hinderance to GDP growth in the country. And as the ramifications of loadshedding continue to undermine profitability, business costs have become the number one risk to their stability.

A clear trend we’re seeing as power cuts worsen is a slow-down in IT spending, particularly as organisations reroute budget to backup power in the form of generators or solar batteries. Indeed, more than a quarter of South African CIOs say their IT budgets either remained flat or decreased in 2022. And another 38% say they’ve increased only to accommodate inflation.

At the same time, the expectations for IT and the wireless network get bigger and more complicated all the time. IT leaders are under pressure to increase day-to-day efficiencies in a secure and sustainable way, while also driving product innovation and creating room for new revenue opportunities. And all this while navigating shrinking budgets and a growing power crisis. 

But the good news is there are ways of making your IT budget stretch further without compromising on your digital transformation objectives. A cloud-managed network solution, for example, can help you reduce ongoing expenses and incur costs only as and when needed.

Here are four ways a cloud-managed network will enable businesses to achieve more despite loadshedding.

1. Make IT more efficient

Connectivity challenges are still run of the mill for many businesses, with the IT team often at the receiving end of regular complaints about the Wi-Fi being down. A cloud-managed network comes embedded with tools to handle reactive tasks on behalf of your IT team.

This ultimately saves the network team significant time responding to problems, trying to figure out where they are occurring and then recreating them in the field before responding. Instead, the cloud-managed service will give them immediate insight into what’s causing the problem and enable them to keep the network up and secure with much less effort, allowing IT to be as productive as possible, spending more time on activities that can have a bigger impact on the business and potentially drive greater revenue.

Not to mention the amount of frustration this saves!

2. Spread out costs over time

Adopting a cloud-based management platform will also enable your business to shift from hardware-based infrastructure that requires heavy capex investment to an opex model. It’s a way of running your IT that is much more budget-friendly because you can spread your expenses over time and spend on additional capacity as and when it’s needed.

Essentially your business will start saving money immediately.

What’s more you can take the budget that would originally have been spent upfront and direct it towards other activities that will have a greater effect on the bottom line.

3. Preserve your investment

The level of flexibility that comes with a cloud-managed network means you can adapt as your business needs change.

Ultimately, this helps you avoid having to replace all your management hardware and losing your initial investment in that infrastructure.

With the pace at which business is evolving, this can end up creating significant cost savings over the long run.

4. Save on energy costs

With less management hardware to worry about, you’ll also be using less energy and power to cool the appliances, which helps with cost savings, especially during times when you’re having to rely on backup power solutions.

At the same time, the IT team will save in time and effort, spending fewer hours maintaining the rack and upgrading the system on a regular basis.

Shifting to a managed network service with a partner like Aruba can give you a network experience that works in line with your budget and doesn’t compromise reliability, performance or security.

While it might be tempting for businesses to delay IT spending while they ride out the storm of power cuts, loadshedding isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

A sound long-term strategy for success needs to factor in the ways in which technology can help your business cut costs today while also helping to make your business more profitable tomorrow.

Loadshedding isn’t a reason to avoid investing in technology but rather a reason to reassess how you invest in that technology.

The stronger the C-suite’s understanding of the nature and role of the network, the better business outcomes will be. This is because a secure, agile network helps companies meet strategic business goals in their digital-transformation journey.

I see this kind of network as the proverbial on-ramp to the digital-transformation freeway. It’s a busy road stretching from the cloud right to the Edge, where people, their devices, and the Internet of Things all connect to the network. This Edge connectivity gives a business access to data and distributed Edge computing for real-time results versus traditional networking set-ups, where data is first funneled through a central data center.

Data drives innovation, and innovation is what businesses must harness to stay competitive. But better, more immediate access to data and Edge processing aren’t the only upsides to digital transformation. We’re all acutely aware of the growing pressure on South African businesses to speed up transformation so they can quickly deliver, constantly innovate, and do so sustainably and securely. Companies must seek out new revenue streams, weave sustainability into their operations, create bespoke data-led experiences, enable deeply immersive omnichannel customer journeys… and much more. All within tighter budgeting and time scopes.

To meet and exceed these needs, the solution is clear. Secure and fast travel on that digital-transformation freeway is only possible if businesses take the on-ramp: investing in the right networking infrastructure. Sound advice in theory, but there is a disconnect in practice, according to insights from a January survey we ran with 200 international business decision makers at organisations of over 500 employees.

Its biggest takeaway is telling: one in four respondents have only a functional or limited understanding of the enterprise network’s true potential. And that can have serious consequences for a company’s digital-transformation targets. 

In my mind, we can group today’s business needs into two overarching categories. The survey offers insight into the level of significance business leaders attach to their network while trying to meet these needs, highlighting that this level must be raised.

NEED 1: Meet increasingly sophisticated customer and staff demands

Business leaders agree their business demands more of technology post-pandemic, with around 41% of South African CIOs saying that modernising their infrastructure is a top tech-driven priority and a further 60% of local leaders maintaining that their most important growth objectives over the next three years include innovation and new products. The reasons are myriad.

For one, customers want better, more integrated offline-online experiences. They want immediacy and convenience in their transactions and interactions, and bespoke offerings. Employees expect the technology they use to help not hinder delivery against customer demands, while improving their own workplace experience. In both cases, the tools needed – to tap into data for tailored engagements, drive more streamlined hybrid journeys, offer choice and personalisation, empower staff to deliver – are technology led. This means there will be more network traffic, and more strain on traditional networks.

Business leaders are also concerned around their organisation’s ability to keep up with the latest tech requirements. In fact, local business leaders cite disruptive technology as the greatest threat to their organisational growth in the next three years.

This doesn’t bode well. If strained networks buckle under pressure, businesses are likely to experience outages or downtime on critical applications used by staff, which breaks business continuity and productivity – frustrating or alienating customers and employees alike.

NEED 2: Strengthen security while driving profitable innovation

A staggering 84% of South African CEOs say they are pursuing an aggressive digital investment strategy to maintain high levels of innovation and secure a first-mover status. However, 53% of respondents to the Aruba survey remain unclear about the network’s ability to support innovation, not to mention how it can provide a strong foundation for cyber defense strategies. Clearly, there’s a need to articulate what the right type of network can help a business achieve.

Real-time data access enabled by an agile network helps businesses up their game in several ways following effective analysis. For example, I see data helping companies strengthen innovation around sustainability initiatives to achieve more energy-efficient IT infrastructure while also better managing their overall use of carbon-based resources. Meanwhile, for 50% of survey respondents, data access is viewed as fundamental to unlocking new revenue streams over the coming year.

Innovation also requires staff to be freed-up from tasks that can be easily automated or expertly outsourced, giving them time to leverage emerging tech in a proactive way that adds business value. If your IT department was supported by AI-powered automation, consider how this would dramatically reduce the time spent on finding and fixing issues.

Beyond the IT team, technology and enhanced digitalisation are now essential to all employees being able to do their jobs, according to 71% of business leaders. Yet over 60% of respondents weren’t aware of the link between the network and staff productivity, and weren’t clear on the practical application of, say, streamlining operations on a network that spans the Edge to the cloud to decrease tech downtime and boost staff productivity.

Running a successful business requires leaders to keep many balls in the air at once, some rubber, others glass. While C-suite members can’t be expected to have all the answers around networking, I think one of the glass balls they’re juggling – one that must not be dropped – is tapping into the network’s unlocked potential. To do this, leaders should be able to lean on the expertise of their IT teams and trusted third-party vendors to gain insights into how and where to leverage their network to stay competitively ahead of the curve.

The networks of yesterday are often rigid and difficult to reconfigure or manage. Faced with organisations’ growing expectations of their efficiency and ability to seamlessly support ever-more distributed workforces, the rapid growth of IoT devices, and the ever-present need to maintain security: networks are now in serious need of network modernisation.

Network modernisation can equip enterprises to address all manner of challenges – from operational to security – especially as they accelerate their digital transformation. In fact, in order to support today’s evolving business models, network modernisation isn’t just necessary it is vital.

When networks can’t keep up

Not only can poor networks lead to their own roadblocks but trying to adapt them to the new demands of today can also create serious operational challenges.

For instance, scaling networks up to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of users and devices across locations and connection types is a hugely manual process when attempted on a network that hasn’t been modernised – often leading to performance issues and unhappy users.

Combine this with scarce IT staffing resources and it means that all too frequently too much time and energy is wasted on basic moves, adds, and deletes – leaving few resources to focus on strategic business initiatives. Finally, without a strong network security foundation, protection gaps are also more likely.

Luckily there are multiple ways an organisation can modernise its networks now and create something that not only meets today’s expectations but can also be a bridge to the future.

5 principles to abide by

Network modernisation isn’t a destination but a journey – a continuous process that businesses must undertake.

With the onset of hybrid working, modern networks must now work equally well and integrate across the full spectrum of possible workplaces, from employee homes to offices and campuses, as well as data centres and the cloud. At the same time, they need to provide a new architectural approach that is edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven.

It is undoubtedly a big project for a business of any size, but it can be effectively managed by focusing on five key areas aimed at providing gains in performance, automation, security, and agility.

1. Connectivity and scale

Remote work, IoT and the new emerging business models of the post-pandemic world are creating hyper-distributed work environments. For older networks based on traditional VLAN architecture, this creates the scaling problem discussed previously – with networks struggling to accommodate the potentially huge number of users and devices spread across such a wide variety of locations.

This is why new protocols and architectures will be essential for scale and connectivity.

There are a few things that can be done to facilitate this. Firstly, choosing to use a cloud-native solution, whether your organisation consumes it in the cloud or on-premises, can add some much-needed agility and timeliness.

Alongside this, modernising WAN solutions with SD-WAN can be another powerful step, offering greater flexibility, efficiency, and cost savings.

The key is to select an approach that doesn’t require the wholesale replacement of current infrastructure, but to find solutions that can coexist with your current architecture.

2. AI-powered automation

Let’s face it, the scale of modern networks and the data they create goes far beyond anything we humans can monitor by ourselves let alone troubleshoot or optimise. This coupled with the scarcity of IT workers, means that teams are stretched thin.

The answer? Automation – or more specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered automation of operations, also known as AIOps.

AIOps will allow IT teams to automate repetitive time-consuming tasks, such as configuration management, while they focus on more strategic tasks. From Day Zero deployment to Day-N of ongoing management, AIOps offers a real and tangible way for organisations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their network operations.

So, what do businesses need to be aware of when implementing AIOps? Firstly, reassure staff. AIOps can be a major culture shift and may leave some staff worried about their jobs, so decision makers must assure their teams that automation is being brought in to help reduce the time and effort they must spend on mundane tasks, not replace them.

Following this, start small to test how AI solutions will work in your work environment. Remember, AI is useful in many situations, but it is by no means perfect – and you shouldn’t trust anyone who tells you otherwise.

3. Security

With today’s network having to accommodate ever-changing and diverse users and devices, effective and up-to-date security is absolutely vital – but legacy networks with manual processes can be prone to human error and vulnerabilities.

IT teams can counter this through the integration of network and security functions with Zero Trust Security and SASE frameworks.

The foundational principle of these frameworks is that access permissions are wholly independent of the method of connection.

Zero Trust ensures that all devices and users accessing a network are identified and authenticated before providing any amount of access through predefined security policies.

Organisations should insist that Zero Trust and SASE are built into their network solutions rather than simply added retroactively – providing consistent policies and control to enable the network to more easily discover, identify, and authenticate devices and users.

4. Flexibility and agility

Rapidly changing business objectives require a network that can quickly – and automatically—adjust to new or evolving conditions. Unfortunately, many organisations today are constrained by a patchwork of disparate network management solutions – creating operational friction and dangerous siloes.

Cloud-native solutions can not only provide a single-point of visibility and control across wired, wireless, and WAN, but also enable organisations to keep their competitive edge by delivering continuous updates and new functionality.

If your organization hasn’t begun implementing cloud for network management, start small and be selective – pick a project or part of your network that would benefit from centralised cloud control and visibility.

A good place to start is remote work environments, where creating the same experience for hybrid workers as those in the office is paramount.

5. Employ as a service

With budgets tight, many organisations face the challenge of how to finance the rapid acquisition, implementation, and management of new network solutions.

Fortunately, the emergence of alternative consumption and deployment models, such as self-delivered or managed services, means this challenge might soon become a thing of the past. The network-as-a-service (NaaS) approach delivers new network solutions quickly while also letting organisations consider their budgets or adjust scalability according to need.

Through NaaS models, organisations can alleviate the burden on IT teams and the time taken to taken for network planning and budgeting by delivering hardware, software, and services in a monthly subscription.

As a first step, evaluate the potential that a flexible financing and subscription approach can offer your organisation and whether your vendor has the resources to support a significant as-a-service model – including whether these are standard service offerings, or they support customisation.

Why is modernising your network is worth it?

Network modernisation might, on the face of it, appear to be simply an exercise in updating your current infrastructure – but it is so much more. It is an essential ongoing process that not only keeps your business up to date with the latest technology but provides an agile foundation to advance your ability to implement digital transformation by taking advantage of new approaches to your security, management, architecture, and delivery.

However, there are some key differences. Each implementation and experience working with various vendors will differ, but some highlights include the following:

1. Contracts

The lease of hardware and software involves the same ordering process as making a purchase. Multiple purchase orders and separate support agreements are involved.

With NaaS agreements, typically a single statement of work (SOW) provides a customised solution built for optimised performance and business outcomes that are inclusive of hardware, software, support, and services.

2. Overprovisioning 

Leasing hardware and software requires the same rigorous planning when an organisation makes a large capital investment, often procured as a one-time event.

This leads to the added cost and inherent risks of overprovisioning or under provisioning. NaaS delivers the flexibility to overcome those challenges.

3. Liability and risk 

The pace of change in technology and added devices can often expose networks to security vulnerabilities. NaaS often reduces these risks by ensuring the latest features and functions are implemented at all times.

Ideal NaaS services include additional insights and analytics, provided through a dashboard, on the operational conditions of the network environment.

Leasing is focused only on the financing of the network hardware and software, typically in a static environment without active services and analytic tools to drive optimal performance.

4. Balance sheet flexibility 

All accounting practices differ within each organisation. NaaS is often supported as an operating expenses (OPEX) model, with some organisations preferring to categorise NaaS as capital expenditures (CAPEX).

From the CIO perspective, NaaS is aligned to an operational IT budget point of view. From the CFO perspective, it is typically a question related to financial statements. The benefit of NaaS is that it is a usage-based agreement delivering services for the OPEX point of view.

For example, a simple NaaS stock keeping unit (SKU) associated as a service-based delivered service could be more easily consumed from an OPEX perspective.

5. Asset management 

NaaS often includes intelligent deployments for achieving the best business outcomes. This includes asset management of all hardware, software, support, and service components. Leasing typically adds more decision layers, such as purchasing, renewing, or renegotiating multiple lease schedules.

The holistic approach to a NaaSSOW alleviates organisations from the burden and resources of asset management.

Consequently, while there can be vast differences between a lease and a NaaS implementation, careful consideration needs to occur with each individual organisation to assess the best method to meet its business needs.

NaaS offers more flexibility in the financial treatment of network deployments for organisations. Careful consideration should be done with advice and consultation from accounting and finance professionals.

More than ever, organisations need flexibility to keep pace with business change, but they are often hindered by a sluggish and rigid network infrastructure.

Below I will describe the five key benefits of implementing an advanced SD-WAN solution and how it can accelerate business growth:

1. Improve business agility while reducing overall WAN cost

To connect branch offices to the corporate data center, organisations have traditionally used expensive MPLS lines. As more bandwidth is required to support increasing connectivity demands, MPLS lines become cost-prohibitive, preventing organisations from fully satisfying their business needs.

New MPLS circuits can take up to four months to be provisioned, greatly slowing down the ability to spin up a new branch. This hinders business changes, agility, and flexibility.

An SD-WAN leverages less expensive internet and 5G connections by virtualising and bonding network links, creating secure tunnels from the branch offices to the data center and to the cloud.

With SD-WAN, organisations can realise the agility needed by the business while reducing costs.

2. Increase security and seamlessly transition to a SASE architecture

Organisations with an MPLS router-based architecture are not able to easily enforce security policies in branches due to the rigidity and the complexity of their network, especially in hybrid-cloud environments. The security perimeter is dissolving as users and devices now connect from anywhere.

Traditional security measures such as VPNs are limited as a VPN doesn’t support enforcement of granular security policies.

Indeed, once a user has been identified and authenticated with a VPN connection, they can access critical resources inside the network even if they shouldn’t.

SD-WAN is the foundational component to implement a robust SASE architecture. By choosing best-of-breed security capabilities with a tight SD-WAN integration, organisations ensure maximum protection to their employees and other stakeholders accessing the network.

3. Enable a cloud architecture

Organisations are migrating their applications to the cloud and use software as a service (SaaS) cloud-hosted business applications such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, ServiceNow and many more instead of hosting them in the data center.

However, organisations with traditional router-based WAN architectures continue to backhaul cloud-destined traffic from branch locations to the data center, mainly for security reasons, severely impacting the performance of cloud applications at the branch.

SD-WAN enables organisations to embrace the flexibility of a cloud architecture while improving cloud application performance by steering traffic directly to the cloud using local internet breakout.

4. Simplify WAN infrastructure

Over the years, organisations have built their network infrastructure as their business grows. Branch offices often ended up with a stack of appliances in their facilities including routers, firewalls, VPN concentrators, and WAN optimisation devices.

Updating a business or security policy such as moving an application to the cloud or improving quality of service often requires manually reconfiguring multiple devices.

Not only does equipment sprawl require advanced networking skills to maintain and manage, but it also results in multiple maintenance contracts to administer.

SD-WAN enables organisations to move to a thin-branch model by reducing the amount of equipment in branch locations streamlining the network architecture and significantly reducing WAN management overhead.

5. Centrally manage network operations and get visibility

Very often, organisations must manage their network operations on a local basis resulting in a lack of flexibility. The network deployment of new remote sites can be tedious and can take several weeks to accomplish.

Corporate IT departments often don’t have complete network visibility to comprehensively monitor transport throughput, packet loss, latency, and jitter.

An advanced SD-WAN continuously monitors network health and automatically adapts to changing conditions to always deliver optimal application performance.

With SD-WAN, new branch offices are set up quickly and easily, and security policy changes can be automatically distributed to hundreds or thousands of branches in minutes while minimising errors. Network administrators can monitor network health through a single pane of glass and dashboards.

Aruba uses use AI-based machine learning to deliver simpler, faster, and more automated networks that analyze data to help businesses thrive.

The company, Aruba, was named a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure recently released its predictions for the year 2022 as presented by Mandy Duncan, Aruba country manager: South Africa.

Prediction 1: Devices will continue to increase as businesses realise the benefits of innovation:

Within South Africa, IoT and the number of devices is reaching a transition point, with businesses realising the benefits of innovations and accelerating further investments in these digital transformational technologies.

Over the next three years, there will be 10x more connected devices as compared to people, making automated secure connectivity of IoT of paramount importance.

Without an automated way to onboard, provision, and secure these devices, organisations will be left vulnerable to security breaches, which are continually growing in sophistication.

Prediction 2: Two approaches to SASE emerge:

With Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) deployments increasing in uptake within the South African market and around the world, organisations will begin to take two main approaches to adoption. While small and medium size enterprises are likely to be attracted to the all-in-one SASE offerings, larger enterprises continue to look for offerings that ensure security, reliability, or the quality of user experience.

This will lead large enterprises to a dual-vendor approach, pairing an SD-WAN partner for on-prem security and WAN facing capabilities and a cloud-delivered security partner delivering secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), and zero trust network access (ZTNA) services.

Prediction 3: The need for connectivity will lead to greater adoption of Wi-Fi 6E in 2022:

While rollout of 5G is a noteworthy answer to connectivity challenges within South Africa – WiFi 6E provides an alternative solution for enterprises.

Many organisations have already witnessed the compelling results of this connectivity, creating more opportunities for them to transform their businesses and deliver compelling end user experiences.

The digital transformation that has been rolled-out is here to stay – and we will continue to rely heavily on the connections we’ve made over the course of the pandemic whether at home, school, the office, or public spaces.

WiFi 6E presents a much-needed solution to burgeoning network problems and as momentum grows, the extra band should serve to alleviate much needed pressure.

Prediction 4: The increased value on “services” will drive an increase in demand for infrastructure consumption models like Network-as-a-Service (NaaS): 

The increased value consumers are placing on “experiences” over “things” and the decline in needing to “own something” has impacted the way businesses operate.

These shifts are playing out in the enterprise this year, with organisations being less focused on devices and capex and more focused on the business outcomes of their technology investments. Organisations want greater financial flexibility and cost predictability, while being able to increase IT efficiency and keep pace with innovation.

A flexible infrastructure consumption model allows for all of this, and for those organisations that aren’t fully ready to take the plunge, flexible consumption models provide the option to “try before buying,” so that enterprises can adopt the new model – or not – at their own pace. This will drive a big increase in demand for consumption-based services like NaaS in 2022.