With the U.S. inflation rate climbing and the economy slowing, prudent businesses are preparing for a possible economic downturn. Some of the biggest names in the technology industry are reassessing their hiring practices, and venture capitalists are preparing for slower times ahead.
How is this translating to other business practices?
Spending on IT networks is expected to rise 3% this year, bringing global IT spending to $4.5 trillion by the end of 2022, but the growth rate is lower than last year. This fact raises the argument that IT managers will be looking to maximize their budgets and network performance more than ever.
Sure, there are simple steps everyone can take to make sure they’re getting the most out of their IT system, like examining training practices to reduce human error and utilizing automation to simplify and expedite certain processes. However, none of these things matter if you’re working with outdated IT infrastructure.
Managing IT Costs With Dark Fiber
In today’s digital-first world, fiber is the backbone of the modern communications infrastructure. It’s the conduit for transmitting information from enterprise locations to data centers and from data center to data center, and it’s the fastest medium available. With more than 50% of people leaving a website if it fails to load in 3 seconds, time is of the essence. And as they say, time is money.
The use of dark fiber is the best way for IT managers to maximize their budget and network performance. But not just any dark fiber. New dark fiber.
Most fiber networks were placed more than 20 years ago. They have been spliced into many times over and often have lower fiber counts. All that translates to constrained bandwidth, meaning enterprises and data centers can’t process data as quickly, nor can they process as much data. These network quality issues cost businesses time and money.
Newly placed dark fiber networks can deliver speeds upwards of 30 Tbps. For example, a recent addition to our dark fiber route in the San Francisco Bay Area showed that signal loss was substantially below a standard loss budget. Lower signal loss allows businesses to process data at the speeds modern customers and consumers demand, helping them maximize IT costs, not to mention increasing employee and customer satisfaction.
The Cloud Still Needs Fiber
Ramping up cloud usage is a popular way to lower IT costs. The use of the cloud means enterprises can reduce the use of on-site storage, which decreases the amount spent on those resources. Even as overall IT spending slows, Gartner predicts that cloud spending will grow 3.7% in 2022. This is even more reason that the quality of fiber is an essential criteria for IT infrastructure decision makers.
Cloud computing allows users to access data over the internet from remote physical servers. It relies on the internet’s infrastructure to transmit data, making fiber a central part of the network architecture. In order to make the most of accessing data stored in the cloud, new dark fiber delivers the fastest results.
Higher Network Quality Pays Dividends
Many IT organizations have become accustomed to buying very expensive optical hardware to get the bandwidth they need from legacy dark fiber networks due to network quality. Not only is this more fault-tolerant hardware more expensive, but it consumes more power which drives up operating costs. Meanwhile, when deploying optical gear on high-quality dark fiber networks, the opposite is true. IT organizations can spend less on hardware while getting higher bandwidth — gaining a productivity lift on their entire infrastructure.
Bandwidth IG’s Dark Fiber Networks
Bandwidth IG is committed to delivering the highest quality dark fiber networks available to enterprises and data centers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Atlanta and Greater Portland areas. Check out our networks — you can even download them for reference later — or contact us anytime to learn how we can help with your connectivity needs.