A new survey of enterprises interested in adopting private networks lays out two primary reasons that they want to do so—and it’s not driven by vertical-specific, high-performance use cases.
Instead, they see the primary value of private networks as providing increased security and network reliability.
“While maybe we thought in advance that they might be thinking of a new business case or some types of specific savings, in reality, by a large percentage, increased security and network reliability stood out,” said Stephen Douglas, head of market strategy for Spirent Communications, which commissioned the survey conducted by STL Partners.
“They saw these capabilities as fundamental table stakes to enable any kind of real, mission-critical use case that they wanted to achieve,” Douglas explained. “If they didn’t have this level of increased security, if they didn’t have guaranteed network reliability, many use cases they were looking to implement or adopt simply couldn’t be done.”
In other words, enterprises want to be certain that new private networks will actually provide a reliable and safe network usage environment, before they’ll jump into more advanced uses of such networks.
The new report is based on a survey of around 200 enterprises of various sizes, conducted late last year by STL Partners. Douglas said that the survey was prompted by Spirent’s service provider customers, who were seeking “a detailed understanding of what enterprises would be looking for in terms of use cases, SLA requirements around private networks,” specifically in the sectors of finance, oil and gas, transportation and logistics and manufacturing—which are seen as the most advanced in terms of willingness to adopt private networks.
Service providers, Douglas said, “were keen not to just speak to these large enterprises who maybe were likely to be adopting a private network, they wanted to understand what those smaller and medium-sized businesses were thinking as well, and if there’s a difference in the challenges and requirements that they might have.” Twenty percent of the survey respondents had between 50-249 employees.
In addition to businesses seeing the primary value of private networks in reliability and better security, Douglas said that the survey also illustrated that service-level agreement (SLA) management is “becoming critical”. Douglas also noted that the survey reflected fairly significant concerns around data sovereignty and IP, related to both security and SLA management.
“In many cases, the kind of private networks that they have tried to implement today or have looked at, it’s been really difficult for them to achieve stringent SLAs both on current public networks but also best-effort or ad hoc networks they’ve developed themselves, using maybe Wi-Fi and wireline technologies coupled together,” he said.
However, Douglas added that the conversation around private networks needs to be tied to business outcomes, such as increased uptime, risk reduction or increased production volume, rather than network-specific KPIs. “It’s the business outcomes are really critical here, because there was a lack of understanding of what … network KPI tied to outcome,” he continued. “But if you could demonstrate to them how the network KPI related to reducing downtime or increased efficiency on the factory floor, they were willing to pay.” And in fact, pay a premium; and they were also most interested in a managed-service and opex models, due to a lack of in-house cellular expertise. This presents what Spirent categorized as an opportunity for “extreme automation” of network lifecycle and continuous network testing, in order to keep opex at a minimum. “Service providers pursuing this opportunity will need unprecedented automation and flexible service level management and testing to address the distinct needs of enterprise applications and use cases,” the report concluded.
“Comprehensive and robust private network service level management is an essential tool to ensure business outcomes as planned. With this in place, a significant opportunity exists for MNOs and CSPs to monetize their investments in 5G,” said Spirent’s Marc Cohn, principal strategist for private networks. “However, as the survey shows, none of this is possible without a mature testing strategy in place and employed in the planning, development, and throughout the lifecycle of the solution.”
