1. The ability of your organisation to deliver on its commitments will increasingly rely on the safe and speedy transfer of information between many different offices and departments.
This might include thousands of sites, central services, the cloud, your supply chain, your customers and more. Low latency and secure access will be critical to making that work.
2. Reacting rapidly to changes in your market and how your services need to be delivered will frequently involve transforming your business processes, sometimes dramatically.
Without the connectivity that makes newer, more efficient processes possible, the old ones can be impossible to retire and will continue to drag on your growth or hamper that agile service delivery.
3. Remote working may be key to helping your teams become more efficient. They can do what they do best, in the field, where the work demands it. Slow, insecure and unreliable connectivity will undo their efforts to deliver the flexibility your organisation needs.
4. However innovative your teams may be, they need to share their ideas rapidly and easily if that innovation is to materialise as new products, new services and boosts in productivity. Only effortlessly rapid and accessible connectivity can do that
In the UK, business connectivity continues to lag behind residential connectivity. Around 8% of small business struggle to achieve speeds of even 10Mbps. Yet capable connectivity is fundamental to accelerating growth.
Meanwhile traffic is only going in one direction. Fixed Internet traffic is set to double in the UK every two years. Mobile data traffic will increase even faster at up to 42% every year. Connected devices will outnumber humans by seven to one in 2020.
The need for secure, reliable connectivity and access to time-critical data in local authorities, schools, research centres, hospitals and more will be paramount.
For businesses it will be the mainspring of their plans to develop growth, compete in a global market and reach out to new customers.