Enabling the adaptive enterprise
Enterprises are becoming more dispersed. Operations, ecosystems and supply chains span the globe. Employees can be anywhere, and that increasingly includes outside the company’s offices, stores and plants. And customers can be virtually anywhere, prospects too.
To make this extended organisation possible, companies are shifting to cloud-based services. Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and SAP, to business systems running on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) are enabling businesses to be more responsive to customers.
Moving to the cloud has enabled organisations to be more flexible, adopt new business models and develop new ways to attract, serve and retain customers. This was vividly illustrated in 2020 when the global economy was disrupted by COVID-19. Businesses that had their core systems in the cloud were able to shift focus to online sales and service, empower employees to work from home and adapt supply chains more quickly.
Verizon was one such company. On March 23, 2020, we went from having 4,000 employees working from home to about 115,000. And with stores forced to close, we were able to retask 15,000 retail employees to help deal with the increase in demand for telephone support and help setting up teleconferencing services. That wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago.
As this mode of working becomes the norm, the strategic importance of connectivity is growing. Companies have relied on their wide-area networks (WANs) for years, but the definition of responsiveness has changed, dramatically.
It used to be acceptable for it to take days or weeks to implement configuration changes. Taking hours to resolve issues was just how things were. IT would wait for users to complain and then initiate a largely manual fault-finding and resolution process. And managing application performance often meant throwing more resources at any problem.
To read full download the whitepaper:
Connecting the adaptive enterprise.
