Master the moment

Change is a constant feature of business life, and each event highlights different business needs: investment priorities change; global supply chains must be redrawn; new offices are opened or existing ones shut down; customer and employee experiences must be upgraded; and new suppliers are onboarded. And infrastructure leaders are now expected to support all these ambitions. The dominance of digital channels in every aspect of business life transforms the infrastructure that supports these activities from a technical consideration to an agent of business transformation.   

In addition, retaining cyber resilience is a top priority, both to facilitate innovation and to strengthen an organization’s security posture. In a world of rapidly evolving and increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats, this requires migrating applications to the cloud and modernizing infrastructure and core enterprise applications to enhance cyber recovery and resiliency. In such a volatile environment, agility becomes a critical competitive differentiator: in the moments that matter, only those that can adapt at the pace these events demand will thrive.

Traditional telco models prized resilience and were complex to deploy, factors that mitigated against rapid changes to the design of these services. Now, however, Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offerings are using Software-Defined networking (SDN), Virtual Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and cloud-native architectures to revolutionize the way organisations consume infrastructure services. Chief among these is Orange Business’s Evolution Platform – its market-leading Network-as-a-Service solution – that enables customers to (re)configure network and security services in near real-time.  

There are currently 16 partners on Evolution Platform, including market leaders such as Fortinet, Palo Alto, Cisco, HPE Aruba, Aviatrix, and Zscaler. These provide a total of 25 different cloud, connectivity, and cybersecurity services, which have been embedded into Evolution Platform. Customers can ‘pick and mix’ from among any of these solutions, with the underlying ‘chaining’ of these services handled automatically by the platform.  

It’s worth noting that Evolution Platform was never intended purely as a vehicle for Orange Business’s services: it was created as the core of a vision in which third parties would leverage the power of the platform to securely provision and connect their services to their customers worldwide. As the momentum behind Evolution Platform accelerates, the range of choices available to its customers will escalate rapidly.  

With Evolution Platform, organisations no longer have to rely on a third party to implement changes to their infrastructure services: instead, they can create, modify, and reconfigure network and security services. This can be done using a simple, self-service portal, or more technically minded customers can use the API-driven developer code interface for a real digital development experience. So, they have the freedom to pivot faster – whether responding to a surge in cloud traffic, countering new security threats, or launching innovative products to capture emerging opportunities. They are also able to overcome volatility in the vendor landscape by switching out one service provider for another,   

The platform also offers consumption-based pricing, allowing businesses – in near-real time – to scale up or scale down resources such as bandwidth and storage requirements. This eliminates the need for large upfront CAPEX investments and enables businesses to adapt to changing market conditions rapidly. 

So, Evolution Platform customers know that, when circumstances change, their infrastructure can too. For example, segmenting a network to facilitate a merger or demerger used to be a complex, resource-intensive process that could easily take six months or longer. However, with Evolution Platform, this can now be done in a matter of hours/days. So, when a situation demands action, customers have the autonomy to take control and ‘master the moment’.    

Evolution Platform is hosted in over 50 Points of Presence (PoPs) around the world, but its services need to be delivered to the points of consumption – our customers’ premises. And here again, the volatility of the real world increasingly intrudes upon the safe passage of these services: geopolitical pressures, social unrest, and extreme climatic events can all threaten the stability of networks and energy grids.  

This is a world in which Orange Business has been operating successfully for decades. We drill our disaster recovery plans every year, and we have a comprehensive suite of failover capabilities designed to maintain operational resilience across network, cloud, and voice infrastructures. We have continued to invest in our Tier One network, and we provide 24/7 global support and monitoring via 30,000 trained experts, including 1,500 field engineers in over 200 countries around the world. That’s why we can offer 100% guaranteed bandwidth and high-availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) together with 5-hour issue-resolution guarantees. 

These global capabilities ensure that the promise of Evolution Platform is delivered in practice – no matter how testing the circumstances or the scale of opportunity might be.

As Charles Darwin observed, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change". And while change is often challenging, it is the ultimate agent of growth. Today, the pace of ‘game-changing’ moments is accelerating, and they often come without warning. As a business leader, you can’t prevent these moments from happening or being created – it’s how you respond to them that will determine your future success.  

Just as evolution in nature allows species to survive and flourish, Evolution Platform enables its customers to thrive in rapidly changing circumstances. With Evolution Platform, businesses – fully confident that the underlying complexity will be handled automatically – can now be on the front foot, driving the change rather than being inhibited by it.    

Evolution Platform empowers infrastructure leaders to not only enhance operational performance but also support broader objectives like improving the customer experience or its Net Promoter Score (NPS), boosting employee productivity and collaboration, and increasing overall business agility. In an environment where resources are stretched, and skills are in short supply, Evolution Platform is game-changing, enabling customers to do more with less and to adapt at the speed the world – and their business – demands.