Matthieu Bourguignon
VP, NI Europe Sales, Nokia
In today’s interconnected world, resilient networks are essential for safeguarding data, ensuring productivity and enhancing business sustainability.
Networks are the backbone of business resilience in today’s fast-paced digital world. For enterprises, having robust and reliable networks is crucial to ensuring uninterrupted operations, maintaining customer trust and safeguarding sensitive information.
Safeguarding operations in the digital age
“Business resilience is the capacity of a company to protect and react to any kind of attack, downtime or outage while maintaining a certain level of performance,” says Matthieu Bourguignon, VP for Network Infrastructure, a business division of Nokia. This protection is crucial for maintaining operational continuity, whether it’s in telecommunications, finance, energy or any other sector.
Multifaceted resilience crucial amid digitalisation
However, physical resilience is just one part of the equation. The rise in digital threats has made it imperative for companies to protect their networks from cyberattacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). A major DDoS attack from an activist group affected companies in Norway, Lithuania and Iceland in July, explains Bourguignon. This underscores the growing threat to enterprises of all sizes, where an attack can bring down systems, disrupt services and impact revenue. Nokia’s Deepfield solution, designed to counter such threats, was crucial in protecting one of the affected companies during the incident.
There is no green without digital, but there is also no digital without being more green.
In the context of digitalisation, networks play an even more critical role. As more companies embrace digital transformation, they introduce new vulnerabilities alongside the benefits. “Digitalisation brings massive productivity gains to companies and improves power consumption, but it also creates new vulnerabilities, especially regarding data privacy and security,” says Bourguignon. Networks must now ensure not only high-performance connectivity but also robust security frameworks to protect against breaches and data theft.
Mutually beneficial networks
Bourguignon sees the biggest game-changers for the telecoms industry as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and sustainability. Strong, powerful networks are essential to fulfilling all of these goals, and they are all interconnected. “There is no green without digital, but there is also no digital without being more green,” says Bourguignon. “Digitalisation can help to reduce a company’s carbon footprint, but it can also contribute significantly to it, like the rise in emissions from data centres that are powering AI.”
Ultimately, networks have become essential for nearly all enterprises. “We believe that all networks are mission-critical because now, even in non-industrial sectors, any outage can have significant consequences,” says Bourguignon. For both big and small companies, reliable, secure and resilient networks are crucial to their ongoing success in this new world.
