Michel Robert, UK Managing Director of Claranet, commented: “The past twenty years of network development have completely changed the ways in which businesses interact with and use the internet. Availability of bandwidth is constantly increasing and costs have gone down, providing businesses with more capacity than ever before to support a variety of services from different locations. However, with the proliferation of devices and cloud-driven applications, it is increasingly important to manage and monitor the flow of data, ensuring that availability, performance and security are optimal.
“Ten years ago the underpinning internet infrastructure was significantly smaller as there was less demand, meaning bandwidth was much more expensive and, accordingly, complex networks were less common. Homeworking VPNs were just starting to increase in popularity, but most traffic travelled back and forth between the user and corporate on-premises servers which meant performance was not always acceptable and user-experience suffered.
“Today, significant volumes of traffic flow back and forth to applications and devices both inside and outside of a business’s wide area network with greater resilience. To exploit the increases in bandwidth and to efficiently manage business’s network estate, providers are investing in software-defined networks, addressing the vital strategic role of the network and not simply treating it as a commodity,” he continued.
Claranet started as a business in 1996 as an Internet Service Provider, before adapting it’s offering to a changing market to become a Managed Service Provider, specialising in infrastructure management.
Robert continued: “Claranet’s twenty year history has put us at the forefront of the major developments in networking technology. Modern networks are not as simple as they once were - the early days of dial-up modems in the mid-1990s looks starkly different from today’s 24/7, cloud-capable infrastructures which support 3 billion users across the globe. Today, the complexities of networking are greater than ever before, something that can pose some distinct challenges for IT departments.
“Through careful management of our customers’ networks we are allowing their businesses to operate in a secure yet highly agile way. Many of our customers share well-established relationships with Claranet, the result of years of innovative network service development and management. Now in 2016, we are increasingly looking toward the future, to our new service Cloud Connect, connecting the Claranet MPLS network to public cloud (AWS and Microsoft Azure) to innovations in software-defined networking that will continue to help our customers do amazing things.”
