New York Digital Transformation in the City That Never Sleeps

As the country seeks to emerge from the economic hit brought on by the pandemic, CIOs in the tri-state region are turning to digital transformation to provide the resiliency they need to keep their operations moving forward to the “next normal.”

The conversation hasn’t changed in terms of digital transformation, SD WAN, cloud migration, network agility, security and disaster recovery. Now CIOs are being more deliberate about where their priorities are and where they need to focus their attention. That includes providing access to the network for remote employees and making sure their architecture can handle it. It’s making sure that they have disaster recovery plans in place with redundancy and resiliency built into the network. Once they feel that’s secure, then the conversation shifts to planning the next stages of digital transformation that will allow the business to recover and grow in a post-COVID economy.

In the retail industry, although some brick and mortar stores are beginning to reopen, many remain shut down. Therefore, industry must continue to accelerate the dramatic shift to e-commerce to sustain their business. This transition to online retail, already trending before the epidemic, has significantly grown as a result of the virus shutdowns. Retailers are turning to cloud technology to provide a better online shopping experience for their customers and the flexibility they need to keep the business moving forward.

We had two major retail customers who needed to quickly get their e-commerce sites up and running. We brought in a team to assess their needs, conduct the migration to the cloud, and set up ongoing management. The result was a better end user experience for their customers and a model of sustainability for the business going forward.

We put together a best in class team made up of IT experts, specialized services consultants, and solutions architects to design a tailor-made solution specific to each customer. By working together as a team, we’re able to take advantage of economies of scale and provide a more cost-effective solution.

Delivering services on demand

For a popular processing and call center provider, the pandemic presented a new set of challenges. The company services more than 30 nationwide brands representing thousands of retail restaurant locations with automated delivery services. When the pandemic hit in early March, demand for automated and hosted take-out and delivery services skyrocketed. This provider had to find a way to keep up with increased network and system demands. They turned to their trusted partners at CenturyLink to help them manage the surge in business.

CenturyLink provided an enterprise-grade voice and data network to ensure dynamic routing and load-balancing to handle the large influx of calls. We also took immediate and quick action to provide additional capacity for voice and data network services to help process the increased online and phone orders for their restaurant clients throughout the U.S. These efforts helped their customers maintain the quality of their existing service as the number of users increased.

The financial sector is innovating as well in these volatile times. These corporations not only need more bandwidth, they need a secure network that protects sensitive data from unauthorized access and provides redundancy to reduce risk of outages as the markets go up – and down. These investments were underway, but they’ve accelerated in recent weeks and I’m proud that our teams have responded.

Crossing Bridges

Resiliency is in the DNA of the CenturyLink network. It’s also part of the culture here and one of the things I love about living in the tri-state area. New York City is the greatest city in the world. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Our customers aren’t just dealing with the current moment, they’re crossing bridges to the future the same as the bridges that lead into Manhattan.

As customers begin to raise their sights to the future, they are assessing how much of their internal and external realities have shifted. Crises accelerate trends. By compressing two or more years’ worth of projects into a few months, virtually every enterprise finds itself at a different point on the digital transformation trendline than before. And wherever they are in that digital transformation journey, the economic context has changed around them. The technology must support them in new ways.

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This article was originally published on LinkedIn on July 13, 2020.

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