XO Communications has announced a bandwidth-on-demand business networking service, available via channel partners, which provides automatic, burstable bandwidth so that IT and network managers can accommodate spikes in bandwidth demand and network traffic.
XO Bandwidth-on-Demand is geared to support enterprises’ multi-cloud environments, it said, which is increasingly important as businesses look to public, private and hybrid clouds to meet business requirements. Companies can commit to a minimal amount of bandwidth they need on an average monthly basis. Should network usage rise above the committed level, the network will automatically expand to accommodate the extra traffic while also maintaining any pre-selected Quality of Service subscription. Alternative solutions are typically pre-scheduled through a portal, or burst at a best-efforts service level.
“Companies used to have to provision network connectivity, circuit by circuit, purchasing and maintaining the maximum capacity required at any given moment, a costly and inefficient approach to network design,” said Don MacNeil, CMO at XO Communications. “XO Communications takes an innovative approach to intelligent networking, allowing the network to flex on-demand. For example, a business can cost-efficiently pay for a low average usage rate that doubles or triples on-demand, without pre-scheduling, during peak cloud usage or to support month-end financial application processing.”
XO Bandwidth-on-Demand is available with XO network services like MPLS IP VPN and VPLS to power customer’s cloud computing and services strategies.
A recent study by Forrester Consulting found that 75 percent of enterprises are using or plan to use cloud-based services. Of these, 88 percent believe that cloud-based services will have an impact on the network.
That study, “Building for the Future: What the New World of Cloud IT Means for the Network” which was conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of XO Communications and Juniper Networks, examined cloud technology adoption trends, application usage types in the cloud, satisfaction levels with expected benefits, and the impacts cloud services are having on the enterprise network. The study found that in order to improve the value of their cloud services and accommodate the impact of cloud services on the network, the majority of IT organizations have had to upgrade their company’s networks. Specifically, the study found that 78 percent of enterprises had to upgrade one or more aspects of the network, and 47 percent of enterprises had to upgrade network bandwidth.
