Leaders Invest in High-bandwidth Despite Economic Uncertainty

FiberLight LLC, a fiber infrastructure provider with more than 20 years of experience building and operating mission-critical, high-bandwidth networks, released results of a survey of 1,750 executive IT and corporate strategy leaders to understand their investment strategy regarding high-bandwidth network services. Despite economic uncertainty, the study indicates the market remains strong, as nearly 88 percent of respondents said they still are investing in high-bandwidth network services and cited data centers, cloud, and dedicated internet access (DIA) are their top priorities.

Driving the investment is the proliferation of emerging applications like 5G and IoT, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Other key factors include the growth of remote and hybrid work models and the surge in cloud computing needs where enterprises are migrating all or a portion of their applications to the cloud.

“Despite the growing concerns of a potential recession and layoffs, businesses are continuing to move forward with plans for fast, secure, and reliable internet access,” said Ron Kormos, chief strategy officer for FiberLight. “Data center strategy has been and continues to be a major driver for connectivity. We have consistently seen a demand for this connectivity and anticipate this will continue. We also anticipate additional growth in cloud computing needs.”

Many organizations either run their business from the cloud or are moving toward that goal. Cloud-based software is essential for these organizations, giving businesses flexibility for their employees to work from anywhere while handling the complexities of redundancy, software upgrades and data storage. The cloud applications executives reported hosting include Unified Communications and Collaboration (Zoom, Webex, Teams, etc.: 22 percent of respondents), Security SaaS (22 percent of respondents), CRM Saas (18 percent of respondents), and other SaaS applications.

A little more than 43 percent of executives said their investment will focus on urban metro geographic areas, while 27 percent said their investment will focus on rural areas, and about 29 percent will focus on suburban areas. This reflects the fact that rural areas continue to be underserved.

In today’s dynamic market where, between remote work, hybrid work, and return-to-office initiatives, people are working from anywhere, and organizations need fast, highly-secure, and reliable options which are not often available in rural areas. These options include connectivity to their own data center, access to multiple cloud service providers, and private network connectivity like dark fiber or private ethernet networks.

When it comes to connectivity upgrades, executives responded their most pressing priorities are security upgrades, followed closely by speed/low latency connectivity upgrades. Because much of today’s organizational information and data resides in the cloud, this type of flexibility drives the need for greater security.

“The survey is consistent with much of what FiberLight is experiencing in today’s very dynamic market where people are working in numerous ways – either on-site, remotely, or a combination of the two. They want robust, highly secure – even private – services to support their network strategy, and especially in underserved rural and suburban geographies,” said Peter Gallagher, FiberLight’s COO.

FiberLight, a fiber infrastructure provider that builds and operates high-bandwidth networks, conducted the survey in December. The 1,750 survey respondents comprise IT and corporate strategy executives who primarily work for companies in the technology software/services sector, although respondents represented companies from a variety of industries.

The full results are available at FiberLight.com.