What’s your single most important tech spend right now?

By Frontier Business Published Nov 10, 2020
Nevermind emerging trends. You need more bandwidth.
In a year full of doom and gloom, IT has been a bright spot for enterprises. Businesses feared the worst for productivity when their teams were forced to go remote. But the truth is, there’s been little to no productivity loss for many. There have even been gains. And IT pro: you’re the one making it happen.

By focusing on keeping people connected to each other, your customers and your assets, you’ve kept operations humming. That’s probably why Gartner predicts: “By 2024, 25% of traditional large-enterprise CIOs will be held accountable for digital business operational results, effectively becoming ’COO by proxy.’”*

That means your tech investments need to support your company’s operational strategy, delivering business value. And while it’s exciting to read about the top tech trends for 2021, the highest-value investment you can make right now isn’t in a hot emerging technology. It’s in your lifeline to your stakeholders: your internet. Here are three reasons why. Work from anywhere isn’t going anywhere
You helped your people stay productive by quickly deploying collaboration tools, secure connectivity and devices. Your teams embraced the technologies and platforms like champs. And for the most part, it’s worked great. Remote workers are connecting and collaborating, staying safe and meeting demands from home.

So what’s to worry about if distance work and hybrid workplaces become the new normal? Two syllables: bandwidth. In his article Bandwidth is the Fuel to Drive Economic Recovery, Ciena CTO Steve Alexander says that in the first weeks of working from home, “Internet traffic in the U.S. and Europe jumped more than 30% on fixed networks, with upstream traffic growing over 80% … and one popular video conferencing service saw traffic soar in the U.S. by 700%.”

The result of that ongoing surge? Frustrating slowdowns and interruptions. Lagging and dropped calls. Threats to security, productivity and privacy. But the solution is simple: upgrade to reliable Dedicated Internet Access for virtually uninterrupted connectivity.

Cloud services are skyrocketing
 With more people accessing data and applications from remote locations, you’re seeing a greater need for cloud-based storage and services. The Spiceworks 2021 State of IT reports: “35% of organizations have or plan to accelerate migration of workloads to the cloud because of the push to remote work.”

The current growth in cloud-based everything is hastening a trend started a few years ago. But before COVID-19, the focus was on cloud storage and collaboration apps. Now, it’s on online backup, recovery solutions and productivity software.

Going forward, a hybrid cloud infrastructure might be your sweet spot. Because a combination of on-premise and Software as a Service solutions and public and private clouds will streamline connectivity between your distributed workforce and datacenters. To keep those connections—and the data that flows through them—secure, you’ll want to add Dedicated Internet Access and bandwidth to support the traffic.

Secondary networks are a first priority
Working from anywhere means more laptops and portable devices accessing your assets. More data being stored and shared on networks that are less secure than your own. And there are more opportunities for bad actors. So it’s not surprising Spiceworks reports that endpoint device security is the top concern IT pros have for their remote workforce.

That concern is compounded by cybercriminals taking advantage of COVID-19 like it’s open season for hacking. In 2020 Cybersecurity Stats You Need to Know, Fintech News reports sobering coronavirus cyberattack stats: 80% of firms have seen an increase in cyberattacks, and there’s a cyberattack every 39 seconds.

So thinking about your operations as “COO by proxy,” you need to strengthen and extend your security strategies to all home and mobile devices and networks. At the same time, build in the redundancy to carry on if your network goes down. It’s as simple as backing up your business-critical programs and data on a reliable secondary network.

That way, if something happens to your primary server, you can seamlessly transfer over to your backup network while restoring the information on your main one. It doesn’t have to cost a lot, either. One example: right now, Frontier is offering its 1 Gig Dedicated Internet Access with 99.99% uptime guarantees for as low as $990/month**.

More bandwidth is the answer. What’s the question?
Last year at this time, you might have been dreaming about emerging technologies like AI, blockchain and edge computing. COVID changed the IT dream. But the good news is, you now have a seat at the C-suite table. Perhaps the driver’s seat.

Your leaders are looking to you to unite your teams, migrate your workload to the cloud, and update your disaster recovery and business continuity plans. To advance operations to keep your remote workforce and your business productive and secure. And it doesn’t take 5G, virtual reality or serverless computing. It takes high-speed connectivity.

Lock in our lowest price ever on 1 Gig Frontier Dedicated Internet Access.

*Smarter With Gartner, Gartner Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2021 and Beyond, October 2020,
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-predictions-for-2021-and-beyond/
**$990/mo plus taxes and fees with 60-month contract on new, renewed or upgraded circuit. Services subject to availability.