INTERVIEW
THE FUTURE OF NETWORKING ALEXANDRE GIBOUIN, HEAD OF CONNECTIVITY DOMAIN, IMEA, ORANGE BUSINESS SERVICES, TALKS ABOUT WHY YOUR ORGANISATION NEEDS SD-WAN TO REDUCE THE COST OF CONNECTIVITY IN A CLOUD-CENTRIC WORLD.
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hat is driving SDWAN adoption in the Middle East? SD-WAN adoption is increasing in the Middle East. Based on our experience of working with enterprise customers across the Middle East, we see two main drivers of the adoption of SD-WAN in the region – both are related to the impact of the pandemic. First, the acceleration of digital transformation and the shift to the ‘digital enterprise’, for which companies need to prepare their network infrastructure ready for cloud transformation (the pandemic has accelerated this trend). Second, the need for companies to optimise the connectivity budget in order to hit cost savings targets in 2021 (an even more vital objective due to the impact of the pandemic). We see these trends playing out with our customers operating in a range of industries, including banking and finance, manufacturing, transport and logistics, and retail. Cloud migration is driving SD-WAN transformation among our customers and when migrating, they need robust and manageable communications infrastructures to support the cloud resources on which their business processes rely. In fact, SD-WAN is becoming an essential tool for IT departments which are increasingly becoming service brokers for a variety of SaaS
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CXO INSIGHT ME
NOVEMBER 2020
applications. By using SD-WAN to manage multiple applications across different service providers, the IT department can offer a diverse portfolio of applications while managing end to end visibility and service quality over the supporting network. Can SD-WAN replace MPLS? In any situation, SD-WAN can help companies benefit from increased visibility, agility and resilience, while transforming their IT to a cloudbased model. The key to a successful transformation journey is the expert support and services to offer companies end to end orchestration of the edge and cloud connectivity, as well as the security and cloud services up to the application layer. What are the SD-WAN requirements for a multi-cloud environment? Most of our enterprise customers in the region who are moving towards the digital enterprise model have already implemented or are on the way to implementing a multi-cloud strategy. It’s easy to see why. Enterprises across the region are facing increasing ICT challenges due to the opportunities and challenges of digital transformation, and the disruption and complexity of ‘tech sprawl’. Digital transformation also disrupts IT departments, as technologies and vendors multiply and complexity increases. Enterprises increasingly want more data and so seek more technology,
adding even more services, vendors and contracts and this will increase as cloud and digital services grow. Of course, it’s not a uniform shift to the cloud and companies are migrating at different rates mirroring the local country regulatory developments - but the major cloud service providers are now in the region and regulators are increasingly looking at the opportunities and advantages of cloud as a driver of digital business transformation, placing data at the heart of the business. Companies which have already moved to the cloud expect the communication infrastructure to deliver best-in-class user experience through efficient solutions, which are more agile and responsive to business demands. Because a significant part of the traffic is transported over the internet, security is also a key factor. We can see the sectors that are transforming at the fastest rates and not surprisingly, these include retail, retail banking, transport & logistics, all of which are very active. In the banking sector for example, cloud migration and digital transformation starts at the first level which covers the non-banking applications and offers flexible costs and a basis for unified communications services in the cloud. Beyond this, the next level involves a shift of the datacenter to the public cloud and moves the network from Software-as-a-Service to Platform-as-a-Service. But the concern we hear regularly is that when moving applications to the
