By Matt Carter, Chief Executive Officer, Aryaka

From AWS to Google Drive, chances are your business is driven by a SaaS consumption model. Multiple clouds, public and private, are common to organisations, and apps keep getting added to the stack – and are expected to perform optimally. The SaaS model has more recently been supplemented with Infrastructure-as-a-Service which provides the framework for businesses to embrace the cloud and maximise their operational ability within this system. This approach is now the modern-day modus operandi, and the answer to the CEO’s mandate to improve productivity, stimulate revenue growth and create an agile digital business model.

The cloud-first “as-a-Service” consumption model, from software to wider network implementation, offers great advantages in productivity, resource-efficiency and convenience to the organisation. The question is, why have enterprises been so quick on the uptake of SaaS yet so hesitant to re-assess the core networking that underpins its capabilities? Organisations today are driven by change and yet many businesses are still reticent to analyse and reconstruct their networks even with floundering connectivity – despite the fact that every business is a digital business and digital transformation requires flexible, agile, efficient networking.

It is time for businesses to take connectivity into their own hands and reduce dependency on the traditional telcos and DIY schemes which are quickly proving incapable of efficiently hosting the vast technology stacks on which businesses increasingly depend. As companies migrate applications and workloads to the cloud, they are faced with the challenge of creating a Wide Area Network that can scale these applications.

What can be done to improve connectivity?

Business networks are so incredibly complex and IT architectures dense with hardware – and software – laden tech stacks that a simplification, a stripping-back process that enables businesses to take back control, is now required.

Multi-vendor solutions, with the logistical difficulties around wiring and MPLS, hinder flexibility and choice and can lock businesses into systems that offer little to no insight internally into the network. This leads to resource wastage, both in human hours and expensive fees, and offers too little control over the network.

As a result of this, many will turn to a DIY solution. These have, for a time, enabled some measure of control over the network, but, crucially, they also require more of the IT organization’s valuable time. Time spent on monitoring the connectivity of your business hinders productivity, an issue not just of interest to executives but also to the UK Government, following its £56 million investment to boost business productivity.

If a business wants to take back control of its network but doesn’t want to spend valuable time monitoring this, it would have traditionally exhausted its options.  This, however, is no longer the case. A cloud-first WAN solution offers the best of both worlds for a forward-thinking corporation, regardless of the size of its IT team. To put it simply, a cloud-first, software-defined WAN solution offers the foundational technology needed to migrate to the cloud combined with the simplicity of having a single portal to manage that network. It gives businesses the flexibility and control they crave, without the hassle of exhaustively monitoring it.

The business benefits of managed networking

The newest cloud-first WAN solutions offer as much or as little connectivity as a business needs, whether it is to connect 10 branches across a dense regional network or 100 branches globally. Businesses no longer need to settle for what they are given by vendors, they can now sustain their own connectivity that is tailored specifically to their own business needs.

The beauty of the cloud-first WAN is that it creates a secure global network connection that’s always on, and provides the security that businesses need within their existing internet, so you can trust all the software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications you use today and tomorrow.

An “as-a-Service” managed network allows business leaders to analyse what is working, what isn’t working and what can be improved, all through a single portal that offers unparalleled internal visibility, in order to exercise full control over this key resort.