How digital infrastructure investments will pay dividends

In industries from healthcare to hospitality, IT managers are facing increased expectations from their users and rapidly escalating demands on their networks.

A greater focus on the customer experience — coupled with converging trends in business, cybersecurity and data management — is driving organizations to reevaluate their technology planning and their investment in digital infrastructure.

• Physical and digital storefronts have merged and retail customers want to move seamlessly between them. Retailers that integrate omnichannel strategies effectively report a 30% increase in customer lifetime value and 23% higher revenue growth than those that don’t.¹
• In healthcare, patients are looking for a smoother, more personalized digital experience. Convenience, discretion, and accessibility are now the baseline. Patients want ongoing support, personalized touchpoints, true representation, easy-to-use technology, and more control over their care.²
• More than seven in 10 of the hotels recently surveyed said they had job openings they were unable to fill despite active searches.³ Serving guests more efficiently is driving adoption of contactless check-in, delivery robots, voice-activated amenities, self-service meeting spaces and other bandwidth-intensive solutions.

Modernizing networking and connectivity

Strategic upgrades to technology capabilities can address pressing short-term challenges while positioning organizations to capture substantial benefits from high-performance connectivity in the years ahead.

High-capacity networks: Enabling remote work and a positive user experience

Organizations are finding ways to increase their efficiency with better network performance in their headquarters, remote offices and wherever their employees do business.

B2C organizations in areas like financial services, retail and hospitality process vast amounts of data every day to deliver hyper-personalized service and improve customer engagement. Likewise, executives in retail, manufacturing and transportation are adopting technologies that give them an edge in automation, logistics and the supply chain — all of which require reliable, secure and high-capacity connectivity.

Network upgrades that capture these opportunities will also need to accommodate organizations that are increasingly spread out. Remote work is here to stay and employers are looking to enable employee productivity across distributed teams. Workplaces are figuring out what works best for them, and hybrid models are pretty popular.⁴ The quality of the networking solutions that organizations can offer their remote employees will have a significant impact on collaboration and hiring as business leaders shape work culture in the years ahead.

Hybrid cloud architectures provide reliable, scalable networking

User experience will also shape investment in cloud adoption. Some 60% of business data is now stored in the cloud.⁵ More of the apps essential to worker productivity and customer service now operate from public clouds than ever before. For many organizations, upscaling their networks with high-capacity Ethernet connections to cloud service providers will be essential to maintaining performance as bandwidth needs grow.

Network architecture and the technology behind it will also need to become more sophisticated. IT infrastructure will have to manage the demands of a multi-cloud environment, with rapid shifting of workloads from one provider to another for the best efficiency and user experience.

Scalable managed services can reduce IT workloads even as networks grow more complex. Large organizations are working more closely with solutions providers to ensure that future demands for bandwidth and network performance won’t outpace what their connectivity services, hardware or IT personnel can handle. Hybrid networks designed with experienced service providers can also lead to more agile IT teams, freeing technical employees from routine network administration so they can focus on building the business. Additionally, large solutions partners can help facilitate connectivity across clouds and deliver very low latency for sensitive applications when they own facilities physically close to key data centers.

Connectivity upgrades strengthen business continuity

According to the Global Cybersecurity Outlook survey, 72% of respondents reported an increase in organizational cyber risks.⁸ The proliferation of user devices, locations and cloud applications compounds the challenge. In a recent study, 75% of the responding businesses pointed to cloud security as their top concern.⁹

These concerns are well founded: The average cost of a data breach in the United States is $10.2 million.¹⁰ For some industries it’s even worse. Healthcare continues to experience the highest data breach costs of all industries, though the costs actually decreased from $9.7 million in 2024 to $7.4 million in 2025.¹¹

There are ways to help mitigate these risks without compromising user experience. Security technologies compatible with high-performance networking can now accommodate bandwidth up to 100 Gbps. To help prevent cyberattacks without degrading performance, organizations can adopt solutions that accelerate traffic routed through both cloud- and premises-based firewalls. They can also automate security workflows and threat intelligence sharing to supplement networking staff and security skill sets. As networks become more complex, risk management should encompass long-term investment in IT infrastructure that includes always-up-to-date cyberthreat management and support for HIPAA, SOX and other industry regulations.

Not all threats come from bad actors, however. A natural disaster, for example, can cause outages and loss of data. To quickly recover from emergencies, it’s essential to have a disaster recovery plan in place. The plan should begin with data replication, which requires connections robust enough to allow for daily backups to cloud service providers. Organizations can also architect diverse backup connectivity options for critical locations

Making sure the investment is well spent

In the face of financial tightening and rising capital costs, IT executives are under pressure to reduce the total cost of ownership and make their infrastructure more efficient. Yet they are continuing to spend where it’s important.

• Two thirds of all respondents to one recent study are heavy public cloud users. Interestingly, heavy users decreased for the first time in 13 years, dropping from 71% to 66%, and moderate increased from 15% to 19% year over year.¹³
• Facing rising wages and a diminished worker pool, more than 70% of hotel executives are turning to technology tools to automate a portion of their operations and boost employee efficiency.¹⁴
• Respondents to a recent manufacturing study reported that, in terms of systems prioritized for investment in the next two years, the first or second highest investment priorities are advanced production scheduling (35%), execution systems (33%), and quality management (28%)^..¹⁵
• Bank IT spending globally is expected to rise at a 9% compound annual rate—well above the projected rate of inflation.¹⁶

These are big investments — and it’s important for organizations to work with a technology partner that has the industry experience, capacity and technical expertise to meet complex demands. A connectivity provider with a nationwide fiber network can help you keep pace with rapidly increasing internet and Ethernet usage. At the same time, a partner that takes a holistic approach to networking solutions can work with you to reduce operating costs over the long term.

For example, a trusted managed services provider can offer options that balance capex with opex when replacing hardware and reimagining network architecture. Reduced costs often result when an organization shifts from a CapEx (capital expenditures) to an OpEx (operating expenditures) model. IT leaders use a general formula to calculate their return on investment from cloud (cloud ROI) by subtracting the cost of cloud infrastructure from the financial benefits from cloud and dividing it again by the infrastructure cost.¹⁸

Another key to cutting costs is reducing complexity. The less time it takes to configure, manage and troubleshoot a network, the more effective IT teams can be at solving bigger organizational challenges. Although it’s possible to engage multiple partners for different components of the network, digital transformation is smoother when organizations choose a single partner with the capabilities to turn on capacity when and where it’s needed across dedicated internet, Ethernet and wavelengths.

Invest in your digital infrastructure

Across industries, the number of users, devices and clouds connected to large networks is only expected to increase. High-performance networking and connectivity with bandwidth up to 100 Gbps is becoming essential for a growing share of large organizations to reliably and securely meet their needs. Organizations that begin planning investments in digital infrastructure now will position themselves to benefit from better performance and increased competitiveness in the future.

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Sources

1. “The Top 8 Retail Business Trends of 2025,” asdonline.com, May, 2025
2. “What Do Patients Want in a Telehealth Experience?,” OpenLoop Health, June, 2025.
3. “65% of surveyed hotels report staffing shortages,” AHLA, February, 2025.
4. “80+ Hybrid Work Statistics in 2025: Productivity & Preferences,” Archie.com, February, 2025.
5. “55 Cloud Computing Statistics for 2025,” spacelift.io, July, 2025.
6. “90+ Cloud Computing Statistics: A 2025 Market Snapshot,” CloudZero, May, 2025
7. “State of the Cloud Report,” Flexera, 2025
8. “72% of cyber leaders say risks are rising. Here’s how states and businesses are responding,” World Economic Forum, May, 2025.
9. “68 Cloud Security Statistics to Be Aware of in 2025,” Astra Security, June, 2025.
10. “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025,” IBM, 2025.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. “State of the Cloud Report,” Flexera, 2025
14. “Hospitality tech investment pays off,” PWC, 2024.
15. “2025 Smart Manufacturing and Operations Survey: Navigating challenges to implementation,” Deloitte Insights, May, 2025.
16. “Tech in Banking 2025: Transformation Starts with Smarter Tech Investment,” Boston Consulting Group, May, 2025.
17. “How Calculating Cloud ROI Helps Businesses Justify Cloud Migration,” TierPoint, June, 2025
18. Ibid.