How COVID-19 has changed business network needs

The pandemic continues to change business as we know it, accelerating network evolution to meet business’ network needs.

That thought fueled a recent conversation between Satya Parimi, Spectrum Business group vice president, enterprise data, and Light Reading’s Alan Breznick during the recent Cable Next-Gen Technologies & Strategies Digital Conference. The two discussed how enterprise networking requirements have changed during the pandemic, what services are expected to be in demand as we move into 2021, and how Spectrum Business is helping businesses meet their evolving needs.

Here are highlights from their conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Alan Breznick: Six months into the pandemic, how have your enterprise clients’ network needs changed?

Satya Parimi: Obviously, a lot has changed in the last six months. I’ll try to split it into three buckets: the beginning of the pandemic, a few months into the pandemic, and now.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a rush to add new phone lines, specifically new soft lines that allowed people to work remotely and for virtual private networks (VPNs) to access their corporate networks. The other big need was for more bandwidth. Upgrades for existing connections and rapid deployment of new connections to support a changing work environment. From a technology perspective, the additional bandwidth was primarily for internet access, but there were also some upgrades to WAN bandwidth.

A few months in, there was a lot of interest in redundancy and backup connectivity options along with managed network services. I heard a lot of our enterprise clients asking, "Can you take over responsibility for some of the management of our networks?"

Now, there are a different set of conversations with businesses. They’re starting to think about the current state of their network infrastructure, about how digitized they are. We’re seeing many of our clients speeding up their roadmaps around digitization which will have a profound impact on their network and IT infrastructure, and us as a partner who delivers them.

Going forward, we expect a lot of enterprises to take a hard look at how digitized they are from a business perspective, if they have the right infrastructure in place and who the right partner is to help them meet their goals.

AB: How do you see enterprise connectivity needs changing in the future, and what kinds of services do you see being in big demand?

SP: Enterprises are taking a much closer look at WANs. We're starting to hear a lot more conversation on, "What do we do with our current WAN technology? What about SD-WAN? Do we leverage our internet infrastructure to build SD-WAN? Should we move to more internet in more places?

Increasingly, a lot of enterprises are looking at their network infrastructure, their IT assets internally, and saying, Should we be doing this, or should we have the service provider do it? Everything from managed security and routing to DDoS protection and VPNs. There’s a lot of interest in trying to see if they can leverage managed network services from service providers.

AB: How is the pandemic changing your roadmap?

SP: In the next six to eight months, we're really trying to tune our roadmap to what enterprises are trying to do in the short term. There’s emphasis on remote work, remote learning, collaboration, unified communications, managed network services, rapid service creation and service upgrades, and all the associated things like automation and orchestration of service delivery.

Over the long term, we're trying to pull forward a lot of the end-to-end automation of services and delivery of services over a virtual infrastructure. This enables us to spin up in real-time or near real-time new services, which can also be consumed in a more dynamic fashion.

To access the full interview recording, please click here. Parimi will continue this conversation at the next Light Reading event, the Cable Next-Gen Business Services Digital Symposium, on Tuesday, Oct. 6. To attend this free event, please register here.