Riding the wave: How CIOs are shaping their networks for a digital futureOctober 2017

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As you shape the future, we help you get there.

Insight, expertise and services that secure your digital future, globally.

Large companies understand that digital transformation is key to their future agility and efficiency. In a recent survey of 400 CEOs across five continents1, every respondent rated it as important, with 40% saying it was at the very top of the boardroom agenda. But the survey also brought to light a major challenge – 86% of CEOs feel their IT infrastructure is stifling progress towards digital transformation.

The volume of data flooding corporate networks continues to grow unabated. Cloud services, complex applications, rich content and an onslaught of big data are placing ever more demands on our networks. This trend is only set to accelerate as software automates ever more of our work and personal lives. And more bandwidth-hungry technologies are on the business horizon – from augmented and virtual reality to autonomous vehicles, from the burgeoning Internet of Things to blockchain and beyond. By 2021, global IP traffic is expected to grow to 278 exabytes a month, almost a threefold increase on 2016 levels.

Furthermore, although CEOs see security as a key enabler of digital transformation. Four in ten regard it as a barrier that’s preventing them from carrying their strategy forward in the way they want. Security threats are increasing all the time in both volume and severity – from pernicious malware to sophisticated targeted attacks2. Barely a week goes by without a major breach hitting the headlines, with victims often forced to admit they failed to attend to some very basic security hygiene factor in a forgotten corner of their systems.

1 Digital CEO survey (September 2017), conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of BT2 Taking the Offensive - Working together to disrupt digital crime (BT/KPMG report)

Keith Langridge,

Vice President of Network Services, BT

Keith has worked for over 30 years in the international telecoms business, all of this time for BT.

He is currently leading the product management team who do development, in-life management, performance and product marketing for all of BT’s UK and global data transport products.

These include MPLS and Ethernet-based VPNs, corporate internet access, bandwidth products and also BT’s Application Performance Monitoring products – collectively the “Connect Portfolio” – a post Keith has held for the last six years.

possible to automate – and indeed orchestrate – ever more network tasks that previously involved engineers crawling under desks, logging in and out of different manufacturers’ configuration and management tools and all the other hands-on manual tasks that have traditionally dogged IT departments.

And in addition to spinning up and managing networks automatically, you’ll eventually be able to secure them automatically to – applying corporate policies network-wide at the click of a button. In order to achieve all these desired outcomes, however, each technology will need to be deployed for the right purpose, in the right way and at the right time.

To help organisations orientate themselves in this rapidly shifting landscape, we surveyed 150 businesses across the world (in partnership with

It is true that the technologies required to manage and secure the networks of today (and tomorrow) have not matured as quickly as needed, but finally a wave of new products and services is emerging to change the way we design, deploy, control and secure our networks – technologies such as application performance management (APM), hybrid WAN, software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) and network function virtualisation (NFV)4.

Although these technologies are at varying stages of maturity, some are truly transformational and almost all should be considered as organisations plot their future networking and security roadmaps. They allow you to set up networks on a new site at breakneck speed – hours rather than weeks in the case of a branch deploying SD-WAN, for example.

Network functions virtualisation, meanwhile, lets you join up all your disparate networking equipment from multiple suppliers and control it all centrally via a portal, from anywhere. If you have a problem on site, you can simply apply a virtualised function (such as acceleration) to fix it – no need to await delivery of a box or find an engineer to install and configure equipment.

As the market matures further and organisations’ networks are increasingly virtualised, it becomes

Riding the wave: How CIOs are shaping their networks for a digital futureThe growing complexity of IT estates makes it more difficult to gain proper visibility and control over networks, increasing the chances of human error when it comes to ensuring all systems, networks and firewalls are properly set up, patched, updated and configured.

In addition, the explosion of mobile devices and cloud-based working complicates access control and authentication, giving hackers many more potential points of entry into a large organisation’s network. And while the traditional models of security are clearly breaking down3, many firms are still struggling to define and transition to a new approach that’s effective for a digitally transformed future.

leading global analysts) in order to understand their needs, concerns and technology plans. This paper digests the findings of our research. It has been designed to help CIOs, CTOs and teams responsible for network and security architecture understand how well-prepared their organisations are in comparison to their peers. With the right information, a well-prepared CIO can harness the flood of data to create new business opportunities, deploy a network and security apparatus that drives differentiation in the marketplace, and ride the wave of progress to a brighter networked future.

1. Towards future networks

An organisation’s network is often the ‘long pole in the tent’ – the thing that takes longest to adapt to changing business requirements. That’s because networks are inherently complex. The entire business depends on them working properly – and configuring and managing them effectively takes deep expertise.

What companies really want is the ability to meet the business objectives of their users and internal stakeholders as quickly and efficiently as possible, while simultaneously assuring the reliability of their day-to-day operations. And although

businesses welcome the opportunity to reduce costs, they see agility and flexibility as bigger, more liberating benefits.

Organisations are also looking to sweat their current investments. But their networks are clearly feeling the strain from the rapid growth in data volumes, as well as from increased use of cloud applications. Networks are also being disrupted by more mobile, agile and flexible working.

As a consequence businesses are beginning to revisit their networking strategies and seek

54 Riding the wave: How CIOs are shaping their networks for a digital future

3 Securing The Digital Enterprise - From denial to opportunity (BT/KPMG report)4 Dispelling the myths - future networks (BT white paper)

alternative technologies to help them transform. For now, though, they are in almost all cases taking an evolutionary, step-by-step approach rather than risk a premature ‘big bang’.

For example, organisations are increasing their use of APM and rolling out overlay SD-WAN networks and/or NFV. Typically they view these technologies as a way of diverting more network traffic securely and automatically over public Internet links as part of a hybrid WAN, in order to relieve pressure on their core networks.

2. Rate of adoption

Organisations are typically testing these new approaches through proof of concept and trialling before deploying them at scale, both to prove they can deliver real benefits and also to mitigate the risks of change to the business.

To ascertain the scale of adoption, we asked respondents when their company plans on making network changes to deploy SD-WAN, APM or NFV services. The percentage of companies that has already invested is low (less than 2% across all these technologies). However, the proportion that has already deployed a hybrid WAN approach is much higher, at 23%.

And despite the generally low adoption rates, it's clear these technologies are on organisations’ radars and under serious consideration. A majority of respondents (just over 61%) said they were looking at NFV as a part of their network roadmap. Within two years, almost a third (31%) will have gone through a proof of concept and almost as many (30%) expect to have fully deployed the technology.

It’s a similar story with APM. More than 60% of respondents have it on their roadmap, with 29% and 31% expecting to have completed proof of concept and full deployment (respectively) within two years.

SD-WAN isn’t quite as far along the adoption curve. Just over a quarter of respondents (27%) are considering how to integrate the technology into their estate, with 14% saying they will have undertaken a proof of concept, and 13% a full deployment, within two years.

3. What companies want

Organisations seem keen to understand how these new technologies can help them, but business imperatives dominate their day-to-day thinking. When asked what was most important to them they perhaps unsurprisingly placed service performance in pole position (74%), followed by service availability (70%), ongoing customer support (57%) and delivery and provisioning of services (46%).

While a significant proportion of organisations are looking to trial and deploy new networking technologies, the survey suggests they may face a challenge in terms of in-house skills. Levels of network engineering skills to deal with hybrid WAN, SD-WAN and NFV are, on average, 10-15% lower than required. This, of course, isn’t surprising given these technologies’ current levels of maturity. However, the gap will need to be filled if businesses want to pursue their networking roadmap successfully, with effective delivery and management.

Interestingly, a quarter of respondents said they would be very likely to adopt new vendors when current equipment comes up for its cyclical refresh, with a further 40% saying they would at least consider them. Again, this seems to suggest there is a growing appetite among organisations to look at new networking technologies and approaches.

4. What companies need

For all organisations, the security of networks is of paramount concern. But the

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traditional approach – using a private network to carry enterprise data traffic between corporate datacentres with a few tightly-secured gateways onto the wider Internet – has limitations and is increasingly seen as bottleneck.

The need to route more traffic over Internet connections fundamentally changes security considerations. When you deploy these new networking technologies, you increase the potential points of entry for attackers. In this environment an organisation can no longer just rely on deployment and management of firewalls and firewall policy. What’s needed instead is a new, multi-layered approach to security.

Businesses recognise this, and survey respondents say they need ‘market leading security’ when deploying these technologies. It was cited as the most important feature in both NFV and hybrid WAN deployments (by 71% and 66% of respondents respectively) and was considered the second most important feature for SD-WAN (with 52% placing it top).

Equally, though, despite the increased attack surface, virtualised networks ultimately improve security since they allow policy to be applied network-wide automatically through software. Indeed, when asked about their key drivers for looking at specific network services, security came in the top three for all the technologies mentioned. It was the number one driver for hybrid WAN (above increased application visibility and reducing overheads). It was number two for for SD-WAN (after speed & flexibility) and NFV (after better bandwidth utilisation). And for APM it came in third (after better bandwidth utilisation and speed & flexibility).

You can explore in more detail how the appoach to security needs to change in our white paper The CISO and CIOs guide to securing networks in a digital age.

Conclusion

New networking technologies have huge potential to improve performance, boost efficiency and agility, as well as easing visibility and control. We believe organisations should proactively evaluate, run proof of concept trials and build these technologies into their networking roadmap, but they must be clear about how and when to take advantage of them. Getting the right balance of innovation and risk for your business and bearing in mind the approach, skills, services and help available to you is key. And of course, any deployment needs to tie in with your business strategy and requirements, and the demands of digital transformation.

As you shape the future – we can help you get there, offering insight, expertise and services that secure your future, globally.

Report methodology

This global report is based on research conducted with more than 150 corporations and insight from BT’s technology and advisory experts.

The survey was conducted in Spring 2017 across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific

The survey spans industries including manufacturing, financial services, retail, consumer goods, and technology industries.

The survey was conducted on behalf of BT by a leading global technology research company.

Issued: October 2017 Find out more at: BT.com

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