Carrier management: Why loyalty to one provider can hold your network back

Ask any executive what their most critical asset is, and you’ll get a range of answers. Some will say it’s their people or their infrastructure; others will say it’s their data. Very few will think of their network. And yet, when the network goes down, almost none of those other assets function properly.

Your network is the very thing that everything else relies on. And because your IT environment is gaining in complexity as data demands intensify and business operations spread across sites, clouds and devices, managing the connectivity layer is also becoming more challenging.

In my experience, most organizations focus on network performance and not on the carrier relationship itself. Does this approach work for them? Is it keeping up with their changing needs? Often, it isn’t.

The incumbent challenge

I see the following scenario far too often. You signed with a major provider years ago. They know your environment, and making a change feels too much like a risk — even if the contract you signed no longer reflects the business you’re running today.

So, the relationship persists long after the reasons for choosing that provider have changed. Over time, your network reflects your history more than your actual requirements.

The large infrastructure owners are not bad partners — far from it. They offer genuine competitiveness within their own ecosystems. But those ecosystems also become your structural limitation. You’re working within their portfolio, and when you outgrow it or a better solution exists elsewhere, the incumbent relationship stops being an asset and becomes a ceiling, capping what your network can do for you.

We’re addressing this challenge through our Carrier Management as a Service (CMaaS) offering, underpinned by a carrier assurance model. Rather rebuilding from scratch, you benefit from the structured takeover and management of your existing carrier relationships, which provides both continuity and the flexibility to transform your network on your terms. This is a more strategic approach to connectivity that ensures carrier decisions continue to support your changing business needs instead of being constrained by legacy agreements.

But that’s only part of the problem

Even if you believed switching providers tomorrow was worth the risk, you’d still be operating in a market that’s difficult to navigate on your own.

Most organizations run into some version of the same issues:

Too many choices

The sheer number of infrastructure providers in the market makes it difficult to identify the right solution for your environment. Should you find one that meets your needs, you are still restricted by what they offer; you end up making do rather than operating at peak efficiency.

Things evolve quickly

Staying fit for purpose comes at a cost. Whenever you change your environment or how your business operates, it takes time and budget. In most organizations, that bill is consistently underestimated.

Deployment slows down

Every time you want to get new services up and running, it requires significant internal resources. You need to negotiate with vendors, survey sites and coordinate installations. Manual or paper-based processes create even more delays, with errors often creeping in. Again, this creates overhead that nobody accounted for.

Every connection is a risk

The more access points your network carries, the greater your exposure to human error and cyberattacks. Keeping firewalls current and data-protection services active is a continuous, resource-heavy discipline.

Your IT team is doing the wrong work

There’s an opportunity cost that rarely makes it onto a balance sheet. The people you hired to drive technology strategy and advance your business end up spending their time managing carriers, chasing installations and troubleshooting issues that should never have reached them.

Multiple carriers; one point of accountability

Network aggregators don’t own the infrastructure — which is precisely the point. Without a network to sell you, there’s no commercial stake in pushing one solution over another. That independence gives you greater leverage, real choice, clear accountability and access to the expertise you need to find the solution that best fits your business.

NTT DATA’s Carrier Management Services (CMS) draws on a network of multiple carrier partners, managing over 25,000 carrier last miles and more than 840 sites across the African continent. While the scale is important, it’s the accountability that changes the dynamic. Instead of managing multiple vendors, contracts and points of failure yourself, you have one partner responsible for the whole picture.

Practically, it means we combine options from a range of technologies — fiber, wireless, satellite (incorporating geostationary orbit and low-earth-orbit solutions) and LTE — depending on what your business needs, rather than defaulting to whatever a single provider happens to sell. Large retailers, for instance, have different needs for small, medium-sized and large branch architectures; financial service organizations such as banks need guaranteed redundancies; and call centers often deal with low-latency traffic. Unique requirements like these demand bespoke solutions.

You also have more flexibility because we can swap providers as your circumstances change and scale your network as your business grows — something that’s far harder to do when you’re running it all in-house.

We also handle the security, automation and day-to-day management of your carrier infrastructure. Firewalls and data-protection services stay current; the network keeps delivering even under difficult circumstances and your IT team gets their time back to focus on initiatives that support your business goals.

You don’t have to start from scratch

A full migration can feel risky, and disruption is a legitimate concern. You are, after all, entrenched in the contracts and setups that keep your business running, and any change may feel like an unnecessary gamble.

It doesn’t have to work that way. CMS is designed for organizations that are midcontract, dealing with multiple incumbents or simply not ready to migrate fully.

We call our entry point “Walk in and simplify.” Without making any big changes, we take over the management of your current carriers and give you one point of contact.

Better visibility and cleaner governance kick in before anything is migrated or changed; thereafter, how quickly you migrate is up to you. You transition in your own time, based on your contracts and priorities.

Once the transition has been made, we shift our focus to how well things are performing — monitoring for issues before they surface and swapping out underperforming carriers where better options exist.

Well enough has a shelf life

You may feel your network is working well enough for you right now. But “well enough” is often not “good enough,” especially when a problem rears its head. What stops most organizations from acting is the assumption that changing the way they engage with their network providers will be costly. It isn’t.

As one of the largest buyers in the market, we pass market-leading price points directly on to you. That means engaging with us doesn’t add to your costs — it reduces them, along with the risk that comes with managing your network yourself.

The higher cost lies in standing still. Whether the impact is visible today or not, continuing with the status quo often proves far more expensive over time.