The way enterprises work these days is a far cry from the centralized headquarters campuses of yore. Today’s global business might have employees, customers, suppliers and partners spread around the globe, in offices and residences and hotels and client sites. And they all need secure tools to manage their IP-based network resources, in order to make use of key business applications that link everyone together and enable productive collaboration.
“We are seeing the result of an ongoing global business extension,” explained Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, director of security solutions at Verizon Business, in an interview. “There has been a progressive shift of information management around the world, where the perimeter of the enterprise has been expanding ever since 1990 when we still thought of a business existing within four walls.”
It’s this diaspora – or, extended enterprise phenomenon – that Verizon Business says must be attacked with cloud-based management and security tools that are tailored for it.
“Customers need to optimize their resources, and a cloud-based approach to that allows them to align network resources worldwide with key business processes in a cost-effective and secure way,” Danellie Young, executive director of global IP services at Verizon Business told xchange. “We are all more mobile and highly distributed, and these are tools to layer on top of our network services to help businesses keep up with that.”
The idea is to give an end-to-end visibility to a company in terms of assets, devices, network utilization and service levels in order for that business to adequately support the bottom-line priorities that are the focus of the company. A variety of different functionalities – like root cause analysis, different reports for different audiences, graphical dashboards and the ability to index the network and technologies present regardless of which vendor or service provider is providing them.
“The customer gets more visibility and control over its network, while service providers can get away from just selling big pipes,” said Paul Conti, principal consultant at CA. “Make it simple in the dashboard, as in ‘what assets are deployed?’ and ‘which are the most problematic?”
When it comes to security, the focus is increasingly on risk management rather than prevention. “As there are more and more stakeholders in a business, and the perimeter expands, the biggest goal becomes identifying the biggest risks to the specific business and then helping them prioritize which to handle first,” said Nguyen-Duy. “Businesses need to analyze the risk level of each, then go into decision-making as to where to focus dollars and attention to mitigate those threats.”
It all represents a “massive shift” in the way companies work, Young said. The sheer complexity, number of locations, number of external partners and number of mobile professionals makes it challenging to run a global enterprise, but also gives carriers an opportunity to fill a market need with simple, cost-effective cloud services that allow companies to monitor and utilize MPLS network services in a way that enhances, not distracts, from core business processes.
