Managing a global network often makes you feel forced to select between equally challenging options. You need to expand capacity to meet growing demand. You must manage expenses to protect your profit margins. And your system needs to operate at peak availability, since this directly affects your co-workers’ and customers’ satisfaction. Conventional wisdom says you have a Sophie’s choice forcing to pick between these two necessary alternatives. Do you spend more to achieve high performance and reliable system implementation? Or do you tradeoff for financial savings and a decreased system performance and less-than-ideal experience?
This is the daily tension. The whole augmented network performance falls under your responsibility for maintenance. When it works well, everyone has a seamless experience. When it fails, you’re the first to know (often loudly). The organization faces an extremely high level of pressure because it needs to see success in every area simultaneously across capacity, expenses and uptime. Attempts to compromise just produce additional issues that emerge later. The network structure is weakened, costly and stressful.
The fast-growing demand for bandwidth stems from the increasing usage of AI together with cloud applications and video streaming services. Your bottom-line profit start to dip. To compensate, many wholesale buyers create a “Frankenstein” network. This is a disorganized network which combines multiple vendors and circuits through various commercial agreements. Sure, it looks like it’ll work on paper. But the temporary answer just creates future pain across all functional areas.
You require a business partner who grasps these difficulties, rather than just an extra entry in your vendor list. GTT provides a different approach with a single, unified global IP backbone with relationships with over 300 cloud and access providers. This means reduced operational complexity while you, your co-workers and customers benefit from a dependable network.
Stop Relying on a Patchwork Quilt
The “stitched-together” network is a familiar story. A bit of fiber from one provider here. A broadband connection from another there. The company needs to choose vendors who will operate across regions, and there’s a negative impact when anything breaks. The organization service degrades and operations can completely cease. The IT team then begins the painful process of troubleshooting across vendors.
This tends to trigger a blame game. The vendors in the chain keep passing the buck to the others. It takes multiple hours to identify the root cause of the issue while your ecosystem suffers. Every minute of brownout or blackout means harm to your business’ brand reputation and financial performance. Your team is mired and exhausted in a reactive mode as they focus on emergencies rather than business objectives focused on optimization and growth.
Ranked as a top global IP network provider, GTT offers a unified IP backbone that operators use to extend and strengthen their own infrastructure. Our organization maintains its own and operate our own backbone to avoid depending on multiple different companies’ network systems allowing for up to 80% of our customers’ traffic to remain on our network from end to end. This produces consistent results, security and reliability, letting you work on performance and growth rather than guesswork.
Complexity and Employee Burnout: The Enemy of Speed
Managing a network built from multiple vendors is an operational burden. Your team has to juggle ten different contracts for ten different regions. The various contracts include their own contractual provisions which consist of SLAs and renewal protocols. The service deployment process requires an extended period as different organizations must work together at various stages of the process. Billing is a whole other nightmare with separate payment systems and timelines.
Your team spends their time on non-essential tasks which do not support their core duties, be it policy optimization, new customer acquisition or business expansion planning. The operational drag impacts your business through delayed responses and postponed customer fulfillment.
Consolidating your network and security services with GTT as a single partner changes this dynamic. As a single provider, we can support IP transit services that can be integrated with DDoS mitigation for proactive protection as a complete service. With GTT your organization has:
- One account team which knows your business operations and understands your worldwide requirements
- One contract, which simplifies your legal and procurement processes
- One invoice system, enabling your accounting process to become more efficient through its implementation
Simplicity frees you. Your team can stop chasing vendors and invest in activities that generate actual value. They can concentrate on network performance improvement to help the business grow and deliver exceptional customer service.
Resilience Built In, Not Bolted On
Network operators must deal with an ongoing fear of power failures. This goes beyond the failure of individual circuits. They are systemic. A route leak from a misconfigured network halfway across the world can disrupt your traffic. A Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijack attack enables attackers to redirect your data traffic toward their own malicious actors. Widespread disruptions can cause simultaneous service outages that affect thousands of customers.
Security and resilience are often an afterthought, acting as an addition to the main system. It means you are always trying to plug holes after they have been discovered; a risky way to run a network, to say the least.
With GTT, resilience is a core part of the network architecture. It is built in from the ground up. The organization runs RPKI validation on all BGP sessions through its established operational procedures. This prevents route hijacking because it authenticates all routing announcements before accepting them. Our backbone is designed with multiple paths and redundancies to ensure that traffic can be rerouted automatically in the event of a failure, while integrated DDoS protection helps preserve availability during large-scale attacks. Safety is not an extra feature (with a separate invoice), but an integral part of the service. The method creates an enduring network system which enables users to work safely while keeping customers happy.
Take Back Control of Your Traffic
The main difficulty in managing a multi-vendor network is the inability to track all system activities. You send traffic out onto the internet and hope it gets to its destination efficiently. You have limited control over the path it takes once it leaves your immediate network. This blocks your ability to initiate performance control measures at the beginning. You are flying without any guidance, an ineffective approach for network engineers who are accountable for performance.
GTT’s foundation is our network. It’s simply what we do. We recognize the need for both control and visibility. We provide operators with the visibility and insight required to manage traffic intentionally. The GTT Envision platform and other engineering-led operational tools provide network monitoring capabilities to users. You can see how your traffic is performing. Users can track both network delay times and lost data packets. You can see the routes your data is taking across our global backbone.
This visibility lets you to actively determine which routes your data will follow. You are no longer a passive observer, but can use this information to optimize traffic flow and achieve maximum application performance. Deliver on those SLAs while still providing users with an outstanding experience.
You do not have to accept fragmentation and complexity as the cost of doing business. You do not have to live with the constant threat of mystery outages and the operational chaos of managing dozens of vendors. There’s a better way to build and scale your network. By augmenting your backbone with a single, authoritative global network, you gain the paths and control needed to support your enterprise services, manage demand spikes and expand with confidence.
GTT builds for scale and delivers the backbone that operators rely on. Choose simplicity with GTT.
