Networking – GDS Africa

Navigate Market Disruptions with Resilient and Scalable Networking

GDS Africa drives digital transformation by architecting and deploying next-generation enterprise networks. Our approach and methodology will integrate existing investments and evolve the enterprise network jointly with multi-cloud resources, internet of things (IoT) deployments, security platforms, and software-defined solutions.

Put Next Generation Enterprise Networking on the Fast-Track

Enterprise IT departments are being challenged to create architectures that are more agile and secure. Implementing these next generation networks is critical for any organization that wants to control operational expenses while leveraging emerging technologies.

GDS Africa works with you to define a practical roadmap for building a next generation network that aligns with stakeholder requirements and budgets. Each roadmap is tailored to provide a clear strategy for turning your infrastructure into a flexible tool for driving business performance.

Expert Guidance Keeps Projects on Track

GDS Africa has decades of experience architecting solutions for enterprise networking. Knowledge, experience, and process-focused tools allow us to deliver agile, secure, and virtualized infrastructure more quickly and affordably. Our approach to next-generation networks includes validated designs for creating greater efficiency even as you implement resource-intensive solutions such as automation, collaboration, digital transformation, the internet of things (IoT), high-speed analytics, and mobilit

Proven Process Unlocks Performance

Our objective is to create a network platform that streamlines operations while delivering a consistent experience across campus, branch, and wide area network environments. To meet this objective, our approach encompasses design, policy, provisioning, and assurance.

Efficient Design Accelerates Implementation

During design, we work with you to identify existing assets that can be reused or repurposed in your next-generation network. We focus on eliminating inefficient siloes, consolidating resources, and establishing backbones that support current and planned needs.

Effective Policy Simplifies Network Management

To support your objectives, we define policies and standards for configuring and managing firewalls, intrusion-detection solutions, network segments, security appliances, and virtual instances. These controls simplify day-to-day network management while promoting security across assets and environments.

Automated Provisioning Increases Control and Efficiency

We further mitigate complexity by delivering automation for provisioning and controlling network assets. These technology and process improvements make it easier for an IT department to on-board and inventory devices and administer the network fabric. To also enhance resiliency, we work with you to segment the network by workload and workflow and to build image repositories for applications and data.

Assurance Tools Promote Visibility

With assurance tools and best practices, we give you access to actionable insights, end-to-end visibility, and streaming telemetry. These measures help you verify that your next generation network is available, compliant, and secure. Our approach to assurance provides continuous monitoring that keeps you aware of conditions even inside extremely complex environments.

Meet the Challenge of Delivering Wireless and Mobility Access

Up to 20 billion more 5G and Wi-Fi 6 capable devices are about to turn on. Wondering how you’ll provide access to internal resources while keeping their overtaxed networks available and secure? GDS Africa understands the challenge of supporting massive numbers of mobile and wireless devices. We are at the forefront of architecting the next generation networks that organizations need to deliver high-performance connectivity to every endpoint.

Detailed Roadmap Delivers Next Generation Networks

We work with you to create a comprehensive roadmap for supporting current and planned wireless and mobility applications. Our engagement process includes assessing your existing network, operations, and physical sites before proposing a solution that delivers greater efficiency.

Our objective is to build on your existing investments while implementing a cost-effective strategy that allows you to innovate and compete even as the technology marketplace continues to evolve. Our approach helps us to understand your current infrastructure and map out practical steps for accelerating network transformation. As we address gaps, we align your business and technical requirements. We work with you to implement an environment that tracks assets and usage, enhances customer experiences, increases employee engagement and workplace productivity, and supports new business initiatives.

Efficient Support Increases Wireless and Mobile Access

We continue supporting your organization with a range of services for creating access at an affordable cost. Technical services help you isolate problems, service hardware, and minimize disruptions. Expertise and automation tools ensure your wireless and mobility investments are providing secure coverage when and where needed.

Managed services provide a cost-effective option for maintaining increasingly complex infrastructure without having to hire hard-to-recruit technical staff. Managed services also provide the tools and expertise to monitor real-time conditions and resolve potential problems before they disrupt access. It is often the best option for managing even very complex aggregations of applications, endpoints, storage devices, servers, and connectivity.

Where self-service is more cost-effective, in-person and virtual services enable you to train existing staff and build in-house expertise. Training enables these workers to acquire the knowledge they need to maintain, troubleshoot, or extend your wireless and mobility infrastructure.

Services That Keep Traditional and Next Generation Networks Up and Running

Network architectures, workloads, and traffic patterns are changing. Managing traditional or next generation networking infrastructure increasingly requires more knowledge, expertise, and technology than many in-house IT departments can afford. GDS Africa works with overextended organizations to provide the best combination of people, process, and tools for keeping network environments secure and available.

Our customer success managers consult with you to configure a service agreement that fits your infrastructure needs and budget. With outsourcing, you are able to move away from handling time-consuming tasks such as troubleshooting, network health monitoring, configuration, and provisioning.

GDS Africa services also provide executive dashboards and IT Service Management (ITSM) automated workflows. Both tools enable you to work more efficiently and pursue goals such as optimizing service delivery, personalizing customer experiences, identifying opportunities for growth and innovation, and creating mechanisms for continuously improving outcomes.

Monitor Network Health

GDS Africa Monitor provides 24x7x365 visibility into your network’s health. This monitoring conforms to Information Technology Infrastructure (ITIL) best practices, which is our primary framework for delivering consistently high-quality service.

Manage Network Incidents

GDS Africa Manage includes monitoring but also includes managing your network to isolate and remediate incidents and move, add, and change levels of service.

Combine Network Monitoring and Management

GDS Africa Maximize builds upon on our monitoring and management offers by adding even more tools and services for optimizing network availability.

Deliver As-Needed Maintenance

GDS Africa Enhanced Maintenance Support gives you direct access to manufacturer-certified technical experts. It also delivers additional analytics for determining how assets are being consumed, which allows you to make changes to further improve network reliability.

Software-Defining Networking for Making Service Delivery Easy

Organizations are committed to digital transformation and using advanced technology to solve big problems. But implementing a digital transformation strategy is challenging—especially if you are relying on outdated infrastructure.

Software-defined networking (SDN) helps you achieve your digital transformation objectives by decoupling the control, data, and packet-forwarding planes of the network stack. This change makes it easier to automate asset management and control resources from a single pane of glass. SDN is a maturing technology and now provides practical options for centralizing orchestration and policy management, migrating to zero-touch provisioning, and extending visibility out to the network edge.

Automation Drives Agility and Lowers Costs

SDN increases business agility by making it easier to configure changes to on-premise, cloud, and hybrid networks. It provides solutions for enabling an infrastructure that supports new models such as DevOps for application and service delivery and solutions tied to the internet of things (IoT).

Along with improving agility, SDN helps lower costs by centralizing network management and enabling automation to deploy applications and services without human intervention. It also helps to avoid creating data siloes and more efficiently manage higher levels of network traffic. Optimizing these resources will become increasingly important as 5G and Wi-Fi 6 access points become common.

Practical Knowledge Accelerates Adoption

SDN technologies are still evolving, which is why it is important to partner with a team that has in-depth knowledge to guide a successful migration. Every journey to digital transformation is unique, so we work with you to implement the strategy that fits your business needs and budget. Depending on your priorities and objectives, we can help you to implement a complete SDN solution or upgrade your existing infrastructure to run a pure software overlay or hardware underlay. We focus specifically on scalability and security since these criteria are critical to project success. Each solution also supports open standards to simplify integration and provide an agile platform for handling future growth.

Software-Defined WAN for Optimizing Communication

Want to integrate with the cloud or take advantage of mobility or the internet of things (IoT)? It can be tough with a traditional wide area network (WAN). Traditional WANs are hard to modify and secure as they become more complex.

We can help you turn a traditional WAN into an agile software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). Using software to orchestrate the WAN allows us to provide load balancing and application-aware behaviors across your infrastructure. These changes enable you to route traffic across specific physical transport connections, lower costs, and improve multisite resource utilization.

Effective Roadmap Modernizes Legacy Networks

We have worked with hundreds of organizations to implement SD-WANs and, in the process, created transport-independent connectivity, improved application performance, optimized user experiences, and automated and simplified network management.

We use a proven engagement model to reduce complexity, increase return on investment, and reduce risk. Our approach addresses the limitations and complexities of the traditional networks and makes cloud and mobility an integral part of your business strategy. Along with providing access to new resources, we use SD-WAN to improve application performance, reduce telecom costs, and streamline moves, adds, and changes (MACs). Our SD-WAN solutions also simplify quality of service (QoS) and path selection, which are historically difficult to deploy and troubleshoot.

SD-WAN Managed Services

GDS Africa can also help you offload the management and remediation of your SD-WAN solution through our Managed Services offering, allowing you to maximize the agility, application control, and efficiency benefits along your cloud journey—while maintaining your internal staff’s focus on strategic business outcomes. You’ll be able to create policies to govern the steering of application traffic to best match your business rules and priorities, increasing uptime, and improving the overall performance of your SD-WAN environment. Also, leveraging built-in advanced security functions provides deep packet inspection and zone-based segmentation within your SD-WAN routing policies. GDS Africa Managed Services provide and maintain segmentation and inspection policies to ensure the solution complies with your organization’s security policy.

Better Connectivity Enhances Agility, Performance, and Security

While improving bandwidth and lowering costs are important, we think it is just as important to fundamentally change how your network is architected, operated, and managed. Understanding these objectives is key if you want to leverage the cloud or pursue digital transformation, mobility, and IoT.

A good roadmap for an SD-WAN engagement includes solutions for centralizing orchestration, policy management, and asset provisioning. To build this understanding, we use automated tools and manual inspection to extract critical data points about the operational state of your WAN environment. Armed with this granular empirical data, we can then determine how traffic behaves and recommend cost-effective options for improving agility, performance, and security.