Network Infrastructure

6 Tips Toward Painless Service Provider Relationships

Thinking of outsourcing your WAN? These tips will help you build and maintain a successful long-term partnership with the right network service provider.

Lenny Liebmann

November 23, 2015

7 Slides

6 Tips Toward Painless Service Provider Relationships

Businesses of all kinds are outsourcing their WANs to managed network service providers. Several factors are driving growth in this area, including:

The expectation that a service provider's economies of scale will reduce operational costs
The expectation that a service provider will be able to more adaptively make changes to the WAN in response to changing business needs
The need to access skills and experience not easily acquired and retained in-house
Broader IT outsourcing strategies intended to keep in-house staff more focused on core business imperatives than on general technology operations
A quest for better network performance that will contribute to improvements in both the digital customer experience and internal end-user productivity.

While these may theoretically be perfectly good reasons to engage a managed network service provider, the reality is a bit less simple. All service providers are not alike -- so network decision makers have to carefully evaluate any potential partner. And a successful service provider engagement doesn't just depend on a careful evaluation upfront. Even a relationship with a great partner can go south if you don't manage it correctly.

Here, then, are six practical tips -- based on the hard-learned lessons of companies that didn't apply them -- for making sure that you build and maintain a successful long-term relationship with the right network service provider.

(Cover image: anadaBGD/iStockphoto)