3 Ways Network Advancements Can Transform Your Midsized Business

Networking is the backbone of every digital aspect of your business, from inventory management and cybersecurity to customer experience and employee productivity. Discover how recent networking advancements can solve common challenges faced by midsized businesses, helping you unlock substantial benefits throughout your organization.

Predicting Growth Can Feel Like a Disastrous Game of Whack-a-Mole

Navigating business fluctuations takes more than just flipping a switch. Inconsistent growth can introduce new variables that, if unprepared, can create growing pains that quickly become visible to customers, employees and investors. For instance, customer and employee experiences can become slow and clunky if your network does not improve proportionately to the increases in data and traffic. This can lead to lost revenue, damaged reputation and operational inefficiencies. And when you are ready to expand—whether with data centers, cloud instances, offices or physical locations—quickly connecting those pieces to the rest of your business is often essential to success.

How can a network support growth?

AI-enabled networks help maximize your network performance based on real-time data, helping present great customer experiences while removing some of the heavy lifting from your IT team. And with the advent of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), you can quickly adjust network capacity, add or remove capabilities and deploy to new locations, helping you to scale while maintaining quality.

As your demand fluctuates, how will your IT team know when you need to adjust your network capabilities? Some networks offer analytics platforms that provide views into impactful performance and security metrics to help your IT team proactively plan for necessary adjustments.

Traditional networks can be difficult to optimize and adjust as your needs change and require significant hardware installations for new locations. NaaS and networking analytics help solve these issues. When Zoom needed to support the exponential growth of their video conferencing products, they would monitor their service utilization and scale up when it reached 50%. Read more about Zoom’s growth-focused approach to networking.

Leapfrogging Incumbents Through Thoughtful Innovation Requires Maximum Agility

To gain market share with fewer resources, midsized businesses need to outmaneuver larger competitors by using an agile approach to testing, learning and launching solutions, seizing upon their weaknesses and discovering unaddressed niches. Without consistent and meaningful innovation, midsized businesses can lose momentum in the market because larger competitors can simply outspend them. As a business leader in a midsized company, you must determine whether your technology is helping to propel you forward or whether it’s holding you back.

To maintain agility, your business needs to seamlessly integrate new digital capabilities, which involves continuously adapting and expanding your technology stack. As the backbone of your digital ecosystem, networks are an important piece of the integration puzzle. Finding a network that provides a powerful API to connect with your tools will reduce the likelihood of issues and troubleshooting time, helping enable a nimble approach to business evolution.

And to become the preferred vendor over larger, wealthier enterprises, midsized businesses need to deliver high-quality services throughout the entire customer experience, not just in the final product or service. Advanced networks can support stellar, personalized digital experiences by combining on-prem, cloud and edge capabilities to transport large data sets quickly and securely.

But how will your team know how well your network is performing? As in every aspect of business, your team should establish clear KPIs and monitor them with real-time performance metrics within the analytics platforms provided by innovative networking companies.

When the Bottom Line Becomes a Top Priority, You Need Flexibility

Managing headcount, inventory, customer experience quality and product development requires a delicate balance of cost and performance. Losing balance could result in poor customer experiences and reduced revenue or overspending that diminishes profits. Three of the main reasons why businesses can feel pressured to overspend are relying on vendors with inflexible costs, utilizing many disparate tools and overestimating headcount expansion needs.

How can a network provide spending flexibility?

Employing a network that offers usage-based pricing can help management protect the bottom line. With NaaS, companies can monitor their network usage and dial up services when needed and save money when demand is subdued.

During growth periods it’s tempting to expand headcount but improving workforce productivity can be less risky and more efficient than hiring. There are plenty of opportunities to gain efficiency by optimizing outdated technology that may be reducing employee satisfaction and increasing turnover. An Adobe survey found that 71% of employees report that poor digital organization disrupts their work and 21% have even considered quitting because of it.²

Traditional networks often lock you into inflexible tiered services and can create a reliance on an overcomplicated and stitched-together technology ecosystem that can result in wasted spending and burdened employees. Employing a fast and reliable network with a powerful API for smooth integration can help influence productivity by effectively connecting your employees to the data and applications they need. Accolade reduced their monthly networking costs by 40% while improving customer experience across their remote CX team and AI-based healthcare benefit portal.

Lumen Provides the Foundation for An Effective Digital Ecosystem

Lumen has earned recognition from trusted experts and organizations across industries for our services powered by the #1 peered global IP network.³ Our AI-enabled network, featuring embedded security, usage-based pricing and a powerful API, complements our suite of advanced products and intuitive customer portal offering robust analytics and streamlined management tools. Leveraging these features, Lumen IP Solutions customers have experienced significant benefits valued at a 229% 3-year ROI, as well as a 35% reduction in network costs and 40% boost in app performance¹.

Investing in advanced Lumen networking solutions is a strategic move that can drive growth and success for your organization. Explore our portfolio today.

¹IDC, The Business Value of Lumen IP Solutions, March 2024.
²Adobe, How digital organization impacts employees and the workplace, September 29, 2023.
³The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), AS Rank, March 2024.

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