Evolve your network to keep pace with the competition: Vodafone Business

Speaking to iTnews readers on a recent webinar, Vodafone Business Principal Strategy Manager Andy Linham, said Asia-Pacific businesses had a difficult balancing act to perform.

“You've got this real balancing act that customers have got to pull off between the flexibility — the agility that they're employees and their customers are absolutely demanding from them — and you've also got to balance that against [heightened] security risks.”

People have become used to the simplicity and immediacy of spinning up cloud services, in much the same way as they became used to working from anywhere through the cloud, he said.

Linham said legacy networks can’t keep pace: “The reality is that networks have never, ever been designed to work that way.”

Customers increasingly wanted solutions providing “end-to-end ecosystem understanding” and lower costs while improving security, said Nadya Melic, vice-president and head of customer solutions told the iTnews audience.

Major logistics provider uplifts APAC operations with communications network overhaul

Security was now a “major talking point” as technology permeated business operations.

Vodafone helped an Australian logistics company serving 13 geographies transform its infrastructure using software-defined networking, mobile connectivity and network security solutions.

“The network is the key,” to assemble solutions to track items in real time using tools such as radio-frequency identifiers (RFID) on an Internet of Things (IoT), said Melic.

Vodafone Business wove a software-defined network fabric composed of traditional internet connections and bolstered by mobile connectivity where the customer had no other internet access.

Reliable, secure connectivity is crucial for logistics given the need to connect devices, track shipments, and enable operations across a global supply chain with no margin for error, Melic said.

Vodafone Business also overhauled the global network of a major Australian bank over three years.

Secure, flexible networks were now “mission critical” for industries such as banking, where any downtime was a significant cost for the bank and its millions of customers.

“The network is the real glue that sticks it together,” said Linham. “Without the network, the business stops.”

Linham also pointed to the need for modern network architecture in an increasingly hostile threat landscape. Solutions such as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) mixed with network-based security enforcement through Software-Defined Networks (SD-WAN) and cloud-based security tools empowered to securely connect users anywhere.

Vodafone Business serves more than 150 million connections for 1400 multinational customers in about 200 countries.  

# Want to know more? Check out the iTnews webinar with Vodafone Business to learn how modern network technologies help your enterprise thrive in challenging times.