Most enterprises of whatever size tend to grow their IT provisions in an organic manner. It’s only start-up businesses which have the luxury of being able to build reliable data systems from the ground up. And even then, those topologies soon either become dated or new technological possibilities come onstream which need to be added for the company to remain competitive.

In many instances enterprises are running a mixture of IT services based on different infrastructures. Some mission-critical applications might remain behind the corporate firewall, while some may have moved out onto public cloud services such as those available from the likes of Google, AWS, NTT, and Microsoft. Some organizations have taken advantage of their ability to build fast-moving, scale-out computing and storage provisions in their own private clouds.

There is no one single solution which is perfect for every aspect of every organization’s computing infrastructure. If only the world were that simple! The cloud and its accessible pay-as-you-use basis is definitely here to stay; it’s worth noting the comments made by CIA Chief Information Officer Douglas Wolfe, who called the US$600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) as “one of the most important technology procurements in recent history.”

When smaller businesses interact with the MSP (managed service provider) of their choice, they can pick and choose from a menu of IT deployment options: in-house, public or private cloud, hybrid cloud, and so forth. The MSP may well even offer a unified interface that manages all aspects of the provision, and also supply an overarching security umbrella to protect the whole package. At this level of business, the MSP is invariably buying in services from third-party suppliers, over which it has little control.

For the smaller enterprise, this type of provision is perfectly acceptable — low-cost, reliable, and with a single point of reference to contact in the event of fault, issue, or a need to expand the service in some way.

But for large enterprises, there are innate challenges in this piecemeal approach to IT platform provision. With the large cloud and wide area network-based service providers jostling for market space, prices and spec of services can change overnight, according to the whims of the market.

This leaves chief information officers and security officers (CIOs, CSOs) with a number of headaches. There are products on the market which claim to be able to manage, for instance, in-house, bare-metal services, Azure, Google Cloud and so on. But, the ever-shifting nature of business needs and services means that ensuring on-going cost efficiency, business agility, and service reliability is never a given.

It is refreshing to learn, then, of NTT Communications and NTT Security —part of the group of companies which make up NTT Group. The one-stop innovation partner for leading global enterprises provides a fully-owned IT platform which encapsulates all the different topological variations that are necessary for today’s agile, technology-based enterprise.

NTT Communications specialises in ICT and offers the global infrastructure and solutions necessary for enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation agenda.

Additionally, it offers a range of services which many consider to be mandatory for ensuring low-cost, high-uptime systems, such as single sign-on (SSO), content delivery networks (CDNs) and software-defined wide area networking capability (SDWAN) for edge-to-edge topologies.

Of particular interest to CSOs (chief security officers) is the fact that NTT Security plays an integral role in all of the Group’s services, so security of the highest standards is “baked in”.

One of the paramount reasons quoted by C-level management for rejecting the deployment of cloud-based applications (especially for business-critical services) is the worry about cloud security. With NTT Communications’ services, provision of encryption, firewalls, WAFs, secure API connections, and so on, are an included ingredient.

Utilizing the range of services available from the NTT Group means that the enterprise can operate now, and plan for the future during even the most complex of cloud transformation exercises. Through a security risk assessment, NTT Security’s consultants will be able to help identify any security pitfalls and plan a long-term security roadmap that’s aligned with the business’s strategic and compliance objectives.

Ironically, many organizations have increased their security liability by ill-planned, fractured migrations onto a variety of public platforms, such as iPaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Of the 500 IT decision makers interviewed by Gigaom as far back as 2014, 71 percent of respondents stated that they were already using SaaS solutions, despite security concerns.

By using the offerings from NTT Communications and NTT Security, even organizations which provide highly-sensitive information and services, such as medical records, can press on to exploit the speed and cost benefits offered by virtualized and cloud environments, based purely on business need..

With NTT Security’s consultative framework providing the backdrop, NTT Communications offer a broad range of cutting-edge technologies which are the epitome of reliability, flexibility, and security. Among these number:

• Enterprise cloud: gives organizations the ability to build their own private cloud technology stacks, abstracted from bare-metal machines, VM, Azure Stack, and OpenStack, amongst others, to provide storage, backup, compute, and failover via industry-standard APIs.
• Software-Defined Exchange Service: part of NTT Communications SDx+M Solution suite, which optimizes hardware performance with software-defined technologies and virtualization to enhance overall operations. The software layer enables enterprises to achieve redundancy and deliver flexible, agile IT services, configurable according to demand in real-time.

The bottom line for businesses is that NTT Communications and NTT Security offer the equivalent of an MSP to large enterprise, with the critical difference that any services or provisions are from the same supplier. This not only ensures a single point of reference for management, but also ensures a highly alert cybersecurity posture at all times.

With NTT Communications and NTT Security, the very latest in business-powering technology is available on a scalable & secure basis as organizations’ needs’ demand.

To learn more about the NTT Group – NTT Communications and NTT Security – get in touch with a representative local to you today.