In today’s hyper-connected landscape, businesses move fast. Customer demands shift overnight, data consumption spikes unpredictably, and innovation cycles are shorter than ever. Yet, traditional telecom development cycles are historically drawn out, falling out of step with the modern pace of business.
Enter Network Agility – the driving force behind Zayo’s mission to reshape this narrative.
Research data from theCUBE reveals that 93% of organizations now view the network as more important to achieving business goals than it was just two years ago. This growing reliance on robust, flexible networks highlights the need for solutions that can keep up with rapid changes in the business environment.
Zayo’s Senior Vice President of Engineering, Aaron Werley, highlights how Zayo is helping businesses stay ahead of the curve, using network agility to unlock a sustainable competitive edge in a rapidly shifting environment.
What is Network Agility?
At its core, network agility is the ability of communications infrastructure to respond to business demands at the speed of change.
According to Werley, the telecom industry has changed drastically over the last several decades. “Historical development cycle times have typically been very elongated,” he explains. “The industry has become stale, lacking material innovation seen many years ago. Many network infrastructure providers continue to expand the footprint and services, adding new speeds and feeds, to meet customer needs, but have not innovated to solve for all the components of an agile network, notably the speed at which we deliver.”
This stagnation is where infrastructure providers like Zayo are breaking away from traditional telcos. Zayo is innovating to provide customers with an agile network designed to iterate and innovate much faster than traditional systems. This approach allows the network to adapt to customer needs in real-time, rather than forcing the customer to wait for the network to catch up. But what does that look like?
The Three Pillars: Agility, Modernization, and Diversity
To fully grasp the concept of network agility, it is helpful to understand how it relates to two other critical network concepts: network modernization and network diversity. While they are distinct, they exist in a form of symbiosis:
- Network Modernization: This refers to upgrading the capability of the network’s physical components. It is the “hardware” aspect, bringing new capabilities into the network that allow for higher speeds, more functionality, and better performance.
- Network Diversity: Think of diversity as an insurance policy. It acts as a safety net, building redundancy into the network to protect against failure. If one route goes down, diversity ensures there is always another way through.
- Network Agility: Agility is your ability to take advantage of modernization and diversity to deliver an adaptive experience based on immediate needs, combining the strengths of both categories for a more capable final product.
Why Does Network Agility Matter?
Why should a business care if its network is agile? Because speed to delivery and implementation is a competitive advantage, inspiring confidence on all sides of a network.
Network users desire confidence. They need to know that they can deliver and receive the products and services they rely on in a timely manner. When a network provider takes 90 or 120 days to provision a service, they bottleneck in the customer’s plans.
“We don’t want to become a speed bump in our customers’ plans,” says Werley. “Zayo aims to help our customers’ projects stay on time and enable them to be more competitive in their respective industries.”
If a business can access what they need, when they need it, they can innovate faster than their competitors. An agile network turns infrastructure from a utility into a strategic asset.
Applying Agility with Amanah
Zayo takes agility beyond theory, putting it into practice with customers like Amanah, a global cloud and IT services provider. Before partnering with Zayo, Amanah faced weeks-long service delivery timelines with legacy providers. This drastically slowed provisioning processes, hindering their ability to serve customers efficiently and scale operations.
By leveraging Zayo’s extensive Tier-1 Network Infrastructure, Amanah dramatically reduced its service delivery window. What once took months now takes just days, allowing them to:
- Accelerate service delivery for their customers.
- Improve customer satisfaction with faster, more reliable connectivity.
- Enhance their competitive edge by being more responsive to market demands.
This is network agility in action. When a business can access what it needs, when it needs it, infrastructure becomes a powerful strategic asset.
Enabling Competitiveness Through Resilience
Unanticipated events happen. Fiber cuts, hardware failures, or massive, unexpected spikes in traffic (like a major streaming event) can cripple a static network. An agile network, however, is capable of “self-healing.”
Because Zayo’s IP core is built on top of our fiber and waves network, we can provide customers with multiple reroute options. This builds resiliency, giving the network more capacity to absorb shocks and keep traffic moving throughout the network without congestion symptoms. Zayo can provide this level of diversity directly to customers because of our 100% owned fiber network, ensuring they stay online even when the unexpected occurs.
Key Elements Enabling Agility
What makes true agility possible? It requires a specific combination of ownership and technology.
- Owner Economics
The first requirement is owning the underlying network. Boutique network providers often build elaborate software to control their networks, but they rely on leasing capacity from major carriers like Zayo, limiting their flexibility and economic control.
Because Zayo owns its network, we can share the benefits of “owner economics” with our customers, allowing for greater control over pricing, provisioning, and infrastructure development.
- Software-Defined Control
Hardware is only half the battle. Zayo has invested heavily in the software side of the coin, most notably with the launch of our new Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) product, DynamicLink. DyanmicLink provides customers with unprecedented access and control, allowing them to scale bandwidth up or down and change routing with a level of ease that companies without their own network simply cannot compete with.
- Advanced Backbone
These software tools are paired with Zayo’s 100% enabled 400G waves network and Tier 1 IP backbone. This combination of massive capacity and intelligent control gives customers the technological capability they need to handle data-intensive workloads at their own pace.
The Future of Agility: Automation and AI
The concept of network agility has evolved from manual, monolithic configurations to abstracted, software-defined networks. But where is it going next?
According to Werley, the trajectory points toward full autonomy. “the clear goal is 100% software-controlled,” he predicts. “You’ll have full autonomy done by systems with human oversight versus human action.”
We are moving toward a future where networks can self-optimize the right connections without human intervention. “AI is going to play a big role in it,” Werley explains. “Having a natural language interface for when humans need to interact with the network will be a major step, leveraging AI for autonomous control will even more impactful.”
Network agility is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity for businesses looking to maintain a competitive edge in a world dominated by automation and AI. By moving away from the slow, rigid cycles of traditional telecom and embracing agile infrastructure, organizations can ensure they are ready for what’s next.