Always-on connectivity: Align your network to how your organization operates

Enterprise connectivity is the backbone of your organization. When it fails, bringing your operations to a standstill, you feel the pain both operationally and financially.

Connectivity was once built around fixed links between sites, with predictable usage. Today, it supports continuous, always-on activity throughout your organization, with far greater demands placed on performance and availability. Even so, many networks are still managed in much the same way, relying on manual processes to configure, provision and respond to issues.

Building high-availability enterprise connectivity that is flexible, resilient and able to scale is fundamental to sustaining performance and aligning your infrastructure with business demand.

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Automation: A new approach to managing networks

The problem isn’t internal networks or cloud platforms; these are designed to be resilient. The greatest area of exposure is the connectivity layer that links the two together. To manage this layer, you need a different approach.

This is where Automated Infrastructure Services (AIS) come in. It introduces a more automated and flexible approach to managing connectivity.

By mapping out and automating repetitive tasks that engineers carry out every day, such as configuring devices, provisioning services and activating connections, AIS reduces the need for manual intervention. This means that changes to the network can be implemented far more quickly and consistently.

Speed and agility, the buzzwords of connectivity, are a reality with AIS. Where multiple steps and continuous manual input were once needed, changes to the network can now be completed almost in real time with far fewer opportunities for things to go wrong.

AIS also enables near-zero-touch provisioning. Once an engineer initiates the service, much of the setup is handled automatically, limiting the need for manual configuration. This approach doesn’t eliminate the need for human-in-the-loop oversight, but because less manual intervention is needed, it enables faster, more accurate deployment.

Flexibility in real time

AIS — and zero-touch provisioning in particular — also enables another innovation: the ability to scale bandwidth in line with business demand.

Flexible bandwidth allows you to increase or decrease capacity as needed, without lengthy processes or contractual constraints. You scale capacity in real time, at the touch of a button, whether to support a short-term spike in activity or to accommodate planned changes in demand.

For instance, when a retailer experiences high demand during a peak trading period, they can easily scale their bandwidth up; once trading has normalized, they can scale it back down again.

This means connectivity is no longer a fixed organizational resource. It becomes something that can adapt to how your organization operates, supporting performance when demand is high and avoiding unnecessary costs when it’s not.

AI: When connectivity starts to think ahead

When all of this is in place and your network is operating in a more automated way, with fewer manual touchpoints, it becomes easier to collect data. And this data is invaluable, because once you run AI on the dataset, you can start to predict when outages will occur and put measures in place to protect your business operations.

Take something as simple as a router overheating. Most networks can pick that up, but AI adds a new dimension. Instead of waiting for the incident to become critical, it can automatically reroute traffic before the failure occurs, giving engineers time to resolve the issue without operational impact.

With embedded AI, network management becomes proactive — anticipating faults before they become issues, and responding quickly and intelligently.

What to look for in a connectivity provider

Connectivity demands are only increasing as your organization’s needs change. Basic connectivity isn’t enough anymore. So, you need to ask the right questions when you’re engaging with potential connectivity providers, and they should be able to answer them clearly.

For example, how is the network managed, and is automation built in end to end? Is the network flexible — in other words, can you scale up or down as demand changes without contractual obligations that tie your organization to a fixed capacity? And how well does the network integrate with other systems, so it can respond automatically as business demand shifts?

Ultimately, you need to know whether your connectivity provider can align with your organization, both operationally and from a cost perspective.

Infrastructure Solutions: A different way of thinking about connectivity

Every organization has different operational needs and cost considerations, and a one-size-fits-all approach to network connectivity is no longer effective in today’s dynamic, always-on environment.

Within NTT DATA’s Infrastructure Solutions, we focus on network automation that makes connectivity more flexible, responsive and aligned with how your organization operates.

The solutions we build aren’t complex; in fact, they’re just the opposite. Our approach simplifies connectivity, with less reliance on manual intervention, enabling your network to respond in real time. The result is a more adaptive connectivity layer that scales with demand, responds to change and supports your organization without acting as a constraint.

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